


But Now We're Found

by skulls_and_stripes



Category: BoJack Horseman
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Pre-Canon, Bisexual Male Character, Childhood Sexual Abuse, Depression, Homophobia, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Past Child Abuse, Period-Typical Homophobia, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Slow Burn, Suicide Attempt, Trauma
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-28
Updated: 2020-08-11
Packaged: 2021-03-06 03:28:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 12
Words: 28,123
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25566697
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/skulls_and_stripes/pseuds/skulls_and_stripes
Summary: The smell of coffee fills his nostrils as he stands his ground. His voice wavers a little, and she can hear it, and he can tell she can hear it, but he lets himself pretend it's all just another scene of the show - repeat the lines he practised, no matter what happens around him, no matter how sure he is that this is all going to fall through. He stands his ground, and Herb doesn't get fired.But what happens next? BoJack is left with a series of issues, an entire childhood of unresolved trauma, and a very grateful coworker.
Relationships: BoJack Horseman & Sarah Lynn, BoJack Horseman/Herb Kazzaz
Comments: 27
Kudos: 68
Collections: Ollywoo AUs





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> writer culture is spending several weeks working on a 50-thousand-word sequel to your 100-thousand-word fanfiction and then just waking up one morning like. "you know what? this stopped being fun to write like 2 chapters ago and nobody's giving me any feedback and i suddenly have a much better idea"
> 
> if i got a dollar every time i wrote a bojack/herb fic that was basically just ... another of my bojack/herb fics but slightly to the left ... god knows id be rich.
> 
> anyway! i know those who know me in this fandom are probably used to me writing ... probably the longest fics in the whole fandom honestly. but this ones gonna be shorter! much shorter! around 2k words per chapter instead of 4k! im doing that partially because my last bojack/herb fic totally flopped (and i suspect that one of the reasons for that is that it sort of intimidated new readers - a lot of people see the huge wordcount and immediately click out, and 95k words so you can read a 50k word sequel is a lot to ask), and partially because i first started making 4k word chapters during the lockdown when i had no responsibilities and now i have to keep up with school/work/et cetera and its a bit much. (dont worry im still probably gonna have a couple super long chapters im just ... saving it for when it matters)

He can almost  _ smell  _ it. The bitter, unfiltered scent of overly strong coffee, a triple-shot long black swirling in her cup, untouched. It wasn’t something he smelled often -- he was no stranger to caffeine, it was hard for him to sleep enough at the best of times, but just being in the same room as something that strong was a little intense for an amateur coffee drinker like him. It took him back to his first experiences with the stuff, when he was maybe six or seven, when he knew the adults around him thought coffee was  _ magical  _ and  _ amazing  _ but he himself would get grossed out by the sheer bitterness of an unwashed cup that he accidentally used to drink water once. 

Besides, on the off chance that he needs more stimulants than your average latte could provide him with, well, there's always illegal drugs.

He learned to associate the smell with anxiety. His own coffee is basically the only beverage he can drink comfortably, without some sort of association with bad experiences. A hot chocolate was the times he would stay up late at night when his parents were both shitfaced drunk, even as they yelled at him and worse for not going to bed, because even as a child he had some awareness that someone had to make sure they were still breathing; a bitter coffee that fails to cover up the putrid smell of the alcohol diluted inside is a ticking time bomb that signifies the next minor slight will result in someone reacting to him with violence; and a triple-shot long black is a terrifying meeting with Angela as he struggles to keep his voice steady.

He can almost smell it now. The sheer memory of that nerve-wracking talk makes him feel like he’s about to be sick from the absurd amount of caffeine that he can’t even see or taste, because it’s nowhere except in his mind. He remembers it so strongly. The coffee sticks out in his mind, because it’s something he focused on, when focusing on how  _ the only person who had ever really cared about him is now depending on him  _ was a little too intense. He would say what he’d rehearsed, like it was just another scene for  _ Horsin’ Around,  _ and instead of thinking about how his voice was wavering and his hands were trembling, he would think,  _ how the hell does she stomach that? _

He never did find out. He’s not sure if she even did stomach it, in any meaningful way. She stirred it during the meeting in such a confident way that he had to question whether it served any purpose at all beyond unnerving him. She left the meeting, shocked, without having once raised it to her lips. Whether that was because it never cooled down enough, or because she never planned on drinking it in the first place, he’ll never know.

And  _ now,  _ the memories of that completely anxiety-inducing meeting are flooding back to him, because he’s holding his breath as he waits to see if he succeeded.

Herb gnaws on his lower lip. “Our pay’s getting docked,” he observes. BoJack, if he’s being honest, wasn’t previously aware of this; he was too busy panicking to actually make sense of the words in front of him. It takes him longer than he’d like to admit to figure out that actually, going from thirty thousand dollars for each episode he appears in to maybe twenty-seven is a  _ good  _ thing, because, well, you can’t dock someone’s pay if you’re not paying them at all, and you generally don’t pay people after you fire them.

He breathes a sigh of relief. “Thank  _ God.” _

“God?” repeats Herb incredulously. “Thank  _ yourself!  _ You’re the one that put your ass on the line to save me.”

“...Yeah.” 

“And now  _ you’re  _ getting a pay cut because of me! God, I’m so sorry. You didn’t have to do this.”

BoJack rubs the back of his neck nervously. “I mean, you  _ did  _ give me a sitcom and make me famous and rich, so, yeah, I kinda did.”

“Yeah, you kinda did. I would have been pissed if you hadn’t.” He sighs. “Just --  _ woah,  _ you know? I mean, I know they  _ need  _ the horse, if they didn’t I wouldn’t have asked you to threaten to walk, but -- there was a  _ moment,  _ there. I was worried that you couldn’t help at all and I was just dragging you down with me.”

BoJack knows the feeling, honestly.

“I was terrified,” he admits. “I was  _ sure  _ they’d just let us both go.”

Herb tilts his head to one side. “But how would they keep the show going without the lead character?”

“I dunno. They’d replace me, I guess.”

“BJ, you’re not  _ that  _ easily replaced.” BoJack opens his mouth to protest but Herb cuts him off. “Besides, we’d all be screwed if I was gone. Who’d look out for Sarah Lynn?”

BoJack groans. “We would  _ all  _ look out for Sarah Lynn, just like we do for the other kids, because she is  _ fine.”  _

“I’m telling you,” Herb insists, starting to gesture wildly. “She’s been acting  _ off  _ for  _ years  _ now!”

“Or maybe that’s just how she acts?” suggests BoJack irritably. “Maybe she changed how she was acting because she  _ got older?  _ Maybe you just have this weird grudge against her stepdad?” 

“Nobody said anything about her stepdad,” says Herb defensively. “I just think she started acting  _ weird  _ a while back.”

“Which, coincidentally,  _ nobody  _ but you noticed, and it happened  _ right  _ after Carol got married.” 

“Sharona’s noticed too! Just ask her. And, why would I have a grudge against her stepdad?”

“I dunno.” He shrugs and folds the paper into a wad which he then tosses in the general direction of the nearest trashcan; when it predictably misses by about a foot, he leaves it there as though expecting it to be someone else’s job, and Herb reluctantly picks it up. “You’re attracted to him and don’t know how to deal with that? You miss William and you resent Richard for taking his place? ...Daddy issues?”

William was Sarah Lynn’s biological father and Carol’s ex-husband. A firefly, he was a small man in both size and impact; he was absent from Sarah Lynn’s life, but not so much so that it was significant to anyone. He showed up from time to time to pick her up after a rehearsal or to show up for the live studio audience, when his work allowed it, and presumably he was also present in her home life, but that would have been restricted to the late hours of night and early hours of morning, when the chances of a young child even being awake were about as low as they came. He died in 1990 from a sudden heart attack, at which point Carol proceeded to date and later marry Richard abnormally quickly, at a speed which made everyone theorise that she either never cared for him or was cheating on him while he was alive, possibly both.

Richard is, of course, a perfectly acceptable man, but Herb remains suspicious.

_ “Daddy issues?!” _ he chokes, clearly offended. “Since  _ when  _ do I have daddy issues?”

BoJack gestures vaguely. “I dunno. I mean, you  _ did  _ create a sitcom about a single father who loves his kids unconditionally. And you  _ did  _ cast your best friend as the dad. Kinda, you know, radiates  _ daddy issues.”  _ While Herb continues to stare at him in shock and offense, BoJack adds, “Hey, no shame, everyone has daddy issues. Or maybe it’s mommy issues? That’s why the horse is single?”

“Quit trying to psychoanalyse my sitcom.” He nudges BoJack playfully in the ribs. “I made the horse a single father because I don’t know how to write about women and I made him love the kids because that’s what parents  _ do.  _ Why are you making all these assumptions, anyway? Do  _ you  _ have daddy issues?” 

BoJack freezes, just for a moment, and Herb obviously notices it by the way he smirks. But BoJack quickly straightens back up and shakes himself off. “They’re called  _ personal  _ issues for a reason, Herb.”

“Sorry. Didn’t mean to cross a line.”

“It’s -- It’s cool. Don’t sweat it. You know what  _ I  _ think about Richard?” When Herb rolls his eyes to communicate that he neither knows nor cares what he thinks about Richard, BoJack answers anyway: “I think he’s a huge  _ nerd.” _

Herb stares at him. “...And?”

“Have you  _ seen  _ his camera?” BoJack gushes uselessly. “It’s a  _ digital camera.  _ That’s a big deal in 1993, which is the year that it currently is!”

“Yes. A digital camera. A truly  _ evil  _ man, who may be hurting a  _ child,  _ but he has a digital camera, so let’s not call the police or anything.”

“Hey, we don’t  _ know  _ that he’s hurting a child. Sarah Lynn is  _ fine.”  _

“If you’re sure…” It’s clear from the way he shrinks where he stands, as well as the fact that he’s turning to  _ BoJack Horseman  _ of all people for reassurance, that he’s not convinced. “Seriously, BJ,  _ thank you  _ for sticking up for me.” He looks down nervously for a moment. “I’ve, I’ve  _ really  _ been stressed lately, you know.”

“Because you got arrested for sucking some dick in a public bathroom and now everyone and their mother knows you’re gay?”

“No, because the weather’s a little humid.” He gives BoJack a blank look.  _ “Yes,  _ it’s because I got outed! God, BJ, you can be an idiot sometimes.” His eyes widen. “Oh shit, do you think my mother actually knows?”

“I dunno. Mine does. She called last week saying you were  _ corrupting  _ me and I should quit. But, I mean, she says that stuff anyway, so…”

“I’ve tried calling my mom to ask if, you know, she  _ knows,  _ but -- she hasn’t answered. And I don’t know if she’s ignoring me or if she just hasn’t gotten a chance.” He bites his lip. “I never really had a chance to know how she’d feel about this, you know? Like, I know she doesn’t exactly  _ love  _ gay people, but -- but if it was her  _ son,  _ it’d be different, right?”

“I dunno. Sometimes your parents just don’t like you.”

“Not helping,” snaps Herb, shooting him a hurt look. 

“Sorry.” He doesn’t sound very sorry. “But, I mean, what I  _ meant,  _ was -- you can live without her, okay? It’s not that big a deal if you lose your mom because of this.”

“Yeah, you’re still not helping. Maybe just shut up?” He’s full-on defensive now. Herb’s always seemed a little  _ on edge,  _ the sort of person who switches from calm to defensive with the drop of a hat, but it’s gotten worse in the last few weeks. Any attempt at a conversation about him getting outed is liable to quickly become an argument.

The thing is, when he gets defensive, BoJack gets more defensive. “Jeez, I’m sorry. At least you’ve still got Brad.”

Herb tilts his head to one side, frowning. “Brad?”

“Uh, yeah?” He gives Herb an incredulous look. “The guy that you were caught banging in the bathroom? Your boyfriend? The one who you said you would never leave because he’s going to stick by your side forever?”

“...Oh,  _ him?”  _ The word comes out as a hiss, filled with a disdain more bitter than the coffee BoJack remembers smelling so strongly. “We had a bit of a  _ debate  _ last week.”

BoJack frowns. “Did you break up?”

“We didn’t  _ break up,”  _ Herb insists. “We just stopped dating because he’s an  _ asshole.” _

“Right, so, you broke up.” 

“And, I don’t  _ need  _ him. I’ve got a  _ new  _ boyfriend, and  _ he  _ really cares about me!” He blushes slightly just talking about him. “His name’s  _ Steven.” _

“Great. I’m happy for you.” He sounds not at all happy for him. “Wonder how long  _ that’s  _ gonna last.”

Herb looks defensive. “It’s gonna last  _ forever,”  _ he snaps.

He couldn’t be more wrong.


	2. Chapter 2

He’s used to getting a little privacy in the hair and makeup room.

He normally wakes up abnormally early, despite the fact that he normally goes to bed abnormally late, leaving him chronically sleep-deprived and tired. But, it does have its perks. Nobody in the cast is really a morning person, so even if it takes him a good hour to even  _ think  _ about showering, waking up at the crack of dawn gives him ample time to arrive on-set well before any of the other actors do. Which is a good thing, too, because on the off chance that he sleeps in or gets otherwise delayed and ends up being after Joelle or Sarah Lynn, it takes  _ forever.  _ He likes getting there early, before the kids start piling up outside demanding to have their own hair and makeup done  _ now,  _ so he can have a little  _ privacy. _

_ Privacy _ is a bit of a strong term, really. Sharona’s always there, hovering over him both physically and mentally, making him tilt his head as she snips away at his mane and occasionally dabs a bit of brown dye over a stained part of his fur, and she tries to get him to  _ talk,  _ ugh.  BoJack and Sharona go out for drinks after work every other Friday. It was supposed to be every Friday, but BoJack flaked so often that she started pre-emptively flaking him back, which took him a month to notice. When he confronted her about it, they had a heated debate that resulted in a  _ compromise  _ of fortnightly hangouts, which gave him plenty of time to go out partying or drinking alone or feeling sorry for himself. 

The annoying thing is, because they hang out every other Friday, Sharona has this weird idea that they’re  _ friends. _

So, they chat. Or rather, she talks at great length about her own life, and BoJack nods along and does a very unconvincing job at trying to act like he gives a shit. And sometimes, she asks him a question about him, to which he usually has to give a defensive or evasive response. It’s tiring.

But, it’s part of his morning routine. Which is why it annoys him so much when he walks in one day and pauses in the corridor, realising that he can hear someone else in the hair and makeup room.

He freezes, ears shooting up to listen. The voice isn’t high-pitched enough to be any of the kids, and before he has time to consider which supporting actor it might be, he realises it’s  _ Herb.  _ Who, of course, never appears on-screen and has no reason to need his hair done nicely -- is he just  _ talking  _ to Sharona? He can hardly imagine such a thing. He devotes so much of his effort each morning and every other Friday night to  _ avoid  _ talking to her, and this  _ idiot  _ is just talking to her because he  _ can? _

_ Herb’s not an idiot,  _ he scolds himself. Well, he might be, but  _ thinking  _ that is not helpful. They’ve drifted apart a  _ lot  _ in the last six years, but Herb  _ wanted  _ them to be friends again, and, well, BoJack  _ did  _ put his ass on the line to stop the guy from getting fired. So, he takes a deep breath, and goes inside. Herb is pacing frantically and ranting to Sharona. 

He’s ranting the most  _ inane  _ bullshit.

_ “Why _ then,” he says viciously. “O brawling _ love,  _ O  _ loving  _ hate, O  _ anything  _ of  _ nothing  _ first created!” 

BoJack leans over to Sharona and says in a whisper, “What’s up with him?”

“He’s an English major,” she explains, waving a hand dismissively. “When he’s experiencing strong emotions he starts uncontrollably quoting works of classic literature.”

“O heavy lightness,” Herb continues, in the same tone of voice he might use to complain about how the lead character in  _ Rebel Without A Cause  _ had  _ several  _ causes. “Serious vanity, misshapen chaos of well-seeming forms! Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health, still-waking sleep, that is  _ not  _ what it is!” He turns back to Sharona, stops pacing, and points to his chest.  _ “This  _ love feel I, that feel  _ no  _ love in this.” He turns to BoJack, frowning. “Dost thou not laugh?”

That last line is the only thing BoJack, having not studied Shakespeare in a good fifteen years, can actually understand, and the thing is, he  _ does  _ laugh. Not overtly, but he can’t stop the grin that spreads across his face. “Sorry,” he mutters sheepishly. “So why, uh, this love feel you, that feel no love?”

Herb opens his mouth like he’s about to correct BoJack’s use of Shakespearean English, and Sharona looks at him like she’s got scissors and she’s not afraid to use him, so he gives an actual explanation. “Steven and I broke up.”

“Jeez,” deadpans BoJack. “Who could have predicted that?”

“It’s not funny,” snaps Herb. “I really thought he was the  _ one!” _

_ “Why  _ would you think that?” He takes a seat in front of the mirror and raises an eyebrow. “Why’d you break up, anyway?”

“Because he’s a  _ dick,”  _ answers Herb, crossing his arms.

Sharona frowns at him. “You know, I didn’t want to say anything, but … you’re  _ literally  _ going through boyfriends faster than fifteen-year-old Joelle.”

BoJack turns to face her. “Why would you specify that we’re talking about fifteen-year-old Joelle? It’s not like we’d be talking about her at any other age.”

“She specified it because Joelle is fifteen in 1993, which is the current year.  _ Duh.”  _ He groans and starts pacing again. “And why the hell are you coming at  _ me  _ for my boyfriends? BJ’s banging a new girl every week.” After a pause, he adds, “No offense, BJ.”

“None taken,” says BoJack, even though, if he’s being honest, there’s a little taken. “And they’re not my  _ girlfriends,  _ they’re just girls I’m banging. You know? No strings attached.”

“There’s always  _ some  _ strings attached,” says Herb, frowning.

“Not if you give them abortion money before you leave,  _ just in case.”  _ He leans back in his chair. “But anyway, yeah, I’m on Herb’s side here. Sometimes you’ve just gotta have a lot of sex to distract from the emptiness inside.”

“That’s not what I’m doing!” says Herb defensively.

“Is it?” asks Sharona, raising an eyebrow.

“It’s not! It’s just -- ugh, you try dating when ninety per cent of the guys you like aren’t even attracted to your gender, and you can’t just  _ ask  _ them if they are because everyone hates gay people?”

BoJack frowns. “But aren’t there, like, places you can meet up with other gay people?”

“Well,  _ yeah,  _ that’s how I met Brad and Steven. But just because we go to the same gay bar doesn’t mean we’re compatible.” Sharona takes a pair of scissors from a nearby counter and he frowns. “Oh shit, should I go now? I can leave if it’ll distract you.”

“It’s fine,” says Sharona, before BoJack has a chance to protest. 

“Actually, while you’re here…” He digs into his pocket and fishes out a folded up wad of paper. “You know the scripts for episode six that you just finished yesterday? I think you made a typo or something on this page.”

“Hmm?” says Herb, frowning. He goes to lean over BoJack’s shoulder to see the page. “...I don’t see the problem.”

“When Ethan’s doing his homework,” he explains. “I mean, if you’re going to write a joke about how he’s such a  _ nerd  _ that he knows how to find the area of a triangle in two seconds, you’d better make sure he actually gets it  _ right,  _ or you just kinda look like an idiot.”

Herb re-reads the page. His frown deepens. “...The area  _ is  _ thirty square inches,” he insists. 

“No, it blatantly isn’t,” corrects BoJack. “I don’t even care about math, I just noticed this because it was  _ obviously  _ bullshit. Ugh, Sharona, give me a hand, here -- if the base is six inches and the height is five inches, the area is  _ fifteen  _ square inches, right?”

She does the mental math for a moment. “Uh, yeah, that checks out. How’d you get thirty?”

“He must have used the formula for finding the area of a rectangle. Like an  _ idiot.”  _ He turns back to Herb. “For triangles, you have to divide the answer by two after you multiply the base and height, because two triangles make a rectangle, you idiot. Do you not know what a triangle is?”

“I --” begins Herb, but BoJack’s already thought of an entire comedy routine at his expense.

_ “Look at me!”  _ he yells, standing up. “I’m Herb Kazzaz!” He waves his arms around ridiculously in a way that Herb has  _ never  _ done, in a bizarre parody of him. “And I can write an _ entire sitcom, _ but basic maths?  _ No sirree! _ ” He picks up the nearest rectangular object, which happens to be a box of orange juice that he highly doubts actually contains orange juice. “Is this a triangle? Who knows? Not me, because I failed middle school!” He drops the parody and gives Herb a blank stare. “Seriously, dude,  _ what  _ were you doing in seventh grade maths class?”

For a moment, a flash of  _ something  _ washes over Herb’s face, something that seems to indicate that maybe the joking has gone a little too far. But, he brushes it off, and whether he was actually hurt, BoJack will never know, because he quickly changes the subject. “That reminds me, I’ve gotta call my mom tonight.”

Sharona raises an eyebrow. “How did  _ that  _ remind you of your mom?”

“Because, I just realised, she  _ can’t  _ disown me. You know why?” They both stare at him blankly. “When I was in the sixth grade, I failed maths.”

“Unsurprisingly,” snarks BoJack.

“And my mom was  _ super  _ disappointed, because she thought it was because I wasn’t paying attention. Which it sort of was, honestly. Who  _ does  _ pay attention in maths class? But anyway, she promised me that if I passed maths in the seventh grade, she’d take me to Disneyland. And, I just  _ barely  _ managed to scrape a passing mark, but I did, and she said I’d have to pass eighth grade too. So, I was like, yeah, sure, I can do that again -- but then, she kept saying,  _ just a little longer,  _ making excuses, saying she couldn’t afford it. And we  _ still  _ haven’t gone to Disneyland!” He crosses his arms stubbornly. “If she disowns me without  _ ever  _ taking me to Disneyland, I’m never gonna forgive her.”

BoJack grimaces. “Hate to break it to you, but, there is a ninety percent chance that she never  _ actually  _ intended on taking you to Disneyland.”

“No way. My mom would never lie to me.”

Sharona stares at him. “Aren’t you rich? You can go to Disneyland whenever you want.”

“Yeah, but it would  _ feel  _ more rewarding if she took me. Just  _ going  _ to Disneyland isn’t as satisfying -- I want to feel like somebody is  _ acknowledging  _ the work I put in to pass seventh grade maths.”

“Oh my God,” says BoJack. He smacks himself in the forehead. “Are you thirty, or twelve?”

“Neither, I’m thirty-one.”

“Then act like it.” He sighs. “Okay, tell you what? If your mom disowns you, then  _ I’ll  _ take you to Disneyland because I’m proud of you for passing math, or whatever.”

Herb’s eyes light up. “Really?”

“Yeah. Sure.” If there’s a hint of sarcasm in his voice, Herb doesn’t notice. “Just don’t put any more maths jokes in the script unless you’re actually gonna get it right.”

“Ugh, there’s not gonna be any more scripts to put maths jokes in! I have the  _ worst  _ writer’s block right now.” He dramatically leans against the wall. “I only get good ideas in the middle of the goddamn night, and then I tell myself I’ll write them down when I’ve woken up, but I  _ always  _ forget it by then.”

“Have you tried writing them down?” suggests Sharona.

“I don’t have anything to write it on! I had this really nice notebook I used, but then one day I took it to the shower with me because that’s where all my best ideas come.” 

“Well, that was dumb,” says BoJack.

“Didn’t you have that one script you were  _ really  _ into?” asks Sharona. “The one you kept coming in to rant about? Scene fourteen was the big fight.”

“Oh, that one? Yeah, I finished the fifteenth scene, and then I stopped writing it.”

“... _ Why?” _

“Because I’m a writer. That’s what writers do. Ugh!”

“Here’s an idea,” suggests BoJack. “Write an episode where, uh, Olivia’s jealous because her classmate is more popular than her.”

“We’ve already done that a bunch of times.”  
  
“Yes, but  _ this  _ time, it’s different, because the  _ reason  _ the classmate is more popular is because … he has a cool camera!”

Sharona raises an eyebrow. “Are you jealous because you think Richard is more popular than you?”

“No. But, it  _ is  _ a cool camera. It’s a  _ digital  _ camera! That’s a big deal in 1993, which is the current year.”

“Why are you specifying that it’s 1993?” asks Herb.

Sharona shudders. “That guy gives me the creeps.”

“You’re being paranoid,” says BoJack, rolling his eyes. He straightens up. “Oh, here’s an idea! Olivia is  _ super  _ jealous of the cool camera, so she convinces herself the classmate is  _ bad,  _ and then checks his camera to see what  _ bad things  _ he did, and finds … nothing. And then the horse teachers her that she shouldn’t assume someone’s  _ evil  _ just because she has a bad feeling about them! You know what they say about assuming -- it makes an ass out of you and me.”

“I’m not allowed to put swears in the episodes,” says Herb defensively. “They’re already breathing down my neck about everything being  _ age-appropriate,  _ since I got outed. Because, I dunno, they think I’m gonna accidentally sneak a gay love story in without them noticing.”

“That’s  _ so  _ ridiculous!” protests Sharona. “It’s not like you can help it. Even  _ you’re  _ not stupid enough to talk about being gay in front of kids.”

“...Uh, what’s wrong with kids knowing I’m gay? It’s not like it’s mature.”

“It’s just … I mean …” She twirls a strand of dyed hair awkwardly. “You don’t want the kids to start thinking  _ they’re  _ gay, do you?”

“Okay, but, kids can be gay.” Sharona frowns. He pretends not to notice. “Do, do you not realise that? Do you think they just wake up on their eighteenth birthday like, ‘oh, shit, I suddenly want to suck cock’?” He gestures vaguely. “I mean, I was literally in the sixth grade when I realised I liked guys. It’s not adult-only.”

Sharona stares at him. She kind of looks a little disgusted. “I mean, I  _ guess  _ that could happen, but -- but we don’t want to be  _ encouraging  _ it, you know?” She raises her hands defensively. “I, I’m not saying it’s  _ bad  _ if the kids  _ are  _ gay, it’s just -- it’s a slippery slope, you know. I mean, first you put it in a kid’s show, then gay people just start  _ talking  _ to kids about it, and then --”

Herb pinches the bridge of his nose. “If you mention pedophilia, I’m leaving.”

“I’m not saying  _ you  _ would do that!” says Sharona hurriedly. “It’s just, I mean,  _ other  _ gay people might --”

“Other straight people do it, and nobody says they shouldn’t be allowed to talk to kids.” BoJack, from his spot leaning against the wall as he witnessed the argument, can tell that a line has been crossed. Herb’s face is a little too blank for someone who’s just been accused of pedophilia, making it clear that there’s something going on behind the scenes of his mind; his arms are stiff at his sides, presumably so he won’t start gesturing defensively, but his legs seem to be moving against his will, one foot tapping on the floor impatiently while the other bends slightly at the knee, ready for a quick exit. “Ugh, I’ve gotta go write. See you later.” He slams the door as he leaves.

BoJack grimaces. “You should probably apologise.”

“Yeah. Later, though.” She picks up a pair of scissors. “I guess you finally have a reason to care if his parents disown him, huh?”

“No.  _ Why  _ would I care? It’s not even  _ my  _ family.”

She raises an eyebrow. “...Because if his mom disowns him, then you have to take him to Disneyland?”

He scoffs. “What, you  _ actually  _ thought I would follow through on that?” He sits down in the chair. “As if.”


	3. Chapter 3

No amount of drinking is  _ too much  _ drinking as long as it’s for a good reason. There’s an important distinction between  _ happy drinking  _ and  _ sad drinking,  _ between partying while he’s wasted and downing a bottle before bed to take the edge off of how much he hates himself. But, drinking is fine when he’s  _ celebrating,  _ and when you’re a rich and famous actor, you’re never  _ not  _ celebrating.

Herb, for some reason, disagrees.

“Jesus! It’s not even eight in the morning yet.” He grips the neck of the bottle with a mixture of anger and concern. “Are you a goddamn alcoholic?”

BoJack waves a hand dismissively, pulling his beer back. “I’m not an alcoholic, I drink this much every day.” Herb opens his mouth to protest, a rebuttal on his lips, but BoJack manages to calm him with a quick and friendly thump to his back. “Besides, I  _ have  _ to drink this early. Do you really want me to have alcohol in front of the kids? Joelle’s old enough to decide to drink it. And Sarah and Bradley aren’t old enough to know why they shouldn’t drink it.”

Herb frowns. “Bradley’s old enough to know what alcohol is.”

“Bradley is  _ eleven  _ in 1993, Herb.”

“Actually, he turned twelve last week. Didn’t you notice? We had a whole party and everything. You ate almost the entire cake.”

“Oh, that was for his birthday? I thought you just decided to give me cake because I’m cool.”

“...Seriously?” He shakes his head. “Well, anyway, Bradley’s twelve. And that’s pretty old! I don’t get why they don’t let kids get tattoos. A twelve-year-old can  _ totally  _ make decisions that will affect him for the rest of his life!”

“Yeah, sure. That’s why twelve-year-olds are allowed to drink alcohol and have sex.”

Herb stiffens. “That’s not what I -- ugh, forget it. Don’t have sex with Bradley or give him alcohol, but don’t patronise him, either. It’s not that complicated.” He leans on the hood of his car. They’re in the car park outside the set, Herb gnawing on a cigarette, while BoJack defensively holds his bottle by the neck. Herb really is messing with BoJack’s routines lately -- first by  _ daring  _ to talk to Sharona, and now, by getting to work a few minutes early and catching him in the act of his car park beer. And, really, there’s nothing  _ wrong  _ with having a quick drink before work, with gulping down as much of the vile stuff as he can bear so he won’t have to steal some from Sharona later on. Herb just got upset with it because he’s a whiny baby that gets offended by everything. 

Herb’s leg bounces anxiously as he leans on the car. “Did you forget my birthday, too?”

“Don’t be ridiculous, I know when your birthday is.”

“Then when is it?”

“Uh…” He falters, then grimaces hopefully. “...Like, tomorrow?”

“What? No! It’s, like, a month away. You forgot  _ again,  _ didn’t you?”

“I didn’t  _ forget,”  _ says BoJack defensively. “I just … didn’t remember.” Herb gives him a look. “Okay, I forgot. We drifted apart! It’s normal.”

“Yeah, sure.” He stares at the bottle still in BoJack’s hand, concerned. “Are you sure it’s healthy to be drinking like that?”

“Ugh, you’re still going on about that?”

“I’ve only been talking about it for two minutes.” He frowns, carving lines into his forehead. “You know, I’ve noticed you and Sharona drink a  _ lot.  _ It’s getting kinda worrying.”

BoJack shows no reaction to the reminder that Herb  _ cares about him,  _ for some reason, and instead grins deviously. “I’ll let you have some if you agree to shut up about it.”

Herb gives him an incredulous look. “You think I want some?!” he chokes. “You think I want to start drinking  _ now?  _ It’s not even eight yet. I’ll get the  _ worst  _ hangover -- and, I’m at work.”

“Yeah. That’s why you only have a little. Just to take the edge off.”

Herb’s frown deepens. “Take the edge off of  _ what?” _

“I dunno. Being alive?”

“...Yeah, I can understand that.” Hesitantly, he takes the bottle, and gulps down a small sip. “I mean, as long as I don’t make it a habit…” 

“Don’t worry,” BoJack insists, waving a hand dismissively. “I mean, I  _ did  _ make it a habit, and I turned out fine!”

“...Yeah, you’re probably right.” He straightens up and starts pacing around. “Seriously, though, do you wanna come to my birthday party? I’m planning on having a big 90s-style party, what with it being the 90s and all.”

“Uh, yeah, sure. I’m down for a party.”

“And you’ll get to meet my parents!” He seems genuinely excited -- there’s a bounce in his steps and a high note in his voice. 

BoJack frowns. “Did you call your mom?”

“No…” His face falls, just for a moment, but he quickly brightens up. “But, it’ll be fine, I’m sure! She can't just  _ disown  _ me, I’m her  _ son.” _

“Yeah,” says BoJack, fingers crossed in the pocket of his jeans. An idea crosses his head and he grins. “That’d be a  _ Kazzaz- _ tro--”

“No.” He glares. BoJack pouts.

“Oh, come on! It was funny.”

“BJ, if I got a dollar every time someone made a shitty joke about my last name, I’d be able to pay for the party with just that! No more jokes.”

“Really?” says BoJack, slightly disappointed. “Because I had this  _ really  _ great idea for a joke based on the Holy Hand Grenade in Monty Python --”

“Monty Python hasn’t been cool for  _ years,  _ BJ.”

BoJack smirks. “Says the guy that still likes the show about three idiots on a bicycle.”

“Take that back!” yells Herb defensively. “It’s not just  _ three idiots on a bicycle.  _ You know, the kung fu episode was so funny someone actually  _ died  _ laughing!”

“That episode had blackface!”

“It wasn’t  _ blackface,  _ it was just a white guy painting his face black to mock black people! Ugh, you wouldn’t get it.”

“Wouldn’t get  _ what?” _

“The comedic  _ genius  _ present in the word  _ ecky-thump!”  _

“That’s not even a word!”

“Oh my God.” He turns away from BoJack and yells into the empty car park. “This guy needs the sense beat into him, somebody get me a black pudding!”

BoJack stiffens.

_ It’s just Herb,  _ he tells himself.  _ He’s joking around.  _ And, it  _ is  _ just Herb and he  _ is  _ just joking around, but he still can’t help the way he sort of tenses up without meaning to. He can almost  _ feel  _ a rough hand on his shoulder, the hand that used to pull him backward and force him to face the man just as he smacks him across the face, a guiltless murmur of  _ this would be so much easier if you didn’t make me beat the sense into you  _ not quite managing to soften the blow, physically or emotionally. Needless to say, when he  _ can  _ feel a hand on his shoulder, pulling him back, he very nearly punches Herb in the face during the confused and panicked flailing that follows.

“Uh, BJ?” says Herb, his frown deepening. 

BoJack straightens up. “Sorry, that was just … a  _ moment.”  _ He jolts with the realisation that he had a  _ moment  _ while holding a glass bottle, right next to Herb, and that could have gone  _ very  _ badly. He opens his car door and carelessly tosses the bottle onto the passenger seat, then locks the door and starts walking toward the set. “Don’t worry about it.” He clears his throat. “So, what were we talking about?”

“You made a stupid joke about my last name,” Herb reminds him. “Which, by the way, didn’t even  _ work --  _ my last name comes from my biological family, and it’s my adopted parents that I need to talk to. Okay?”

BoJack frowns. “You’re adopted?”

“...Uh, yeah?” He raises an eyebrow. “Didn’t you know? I talk about it all the time.”

“Yeah, but I didn’t listen.”

“Why the hell do you think I made a sitcom about adopted kids?”

“I dunno. Daddy issues?” He shrugs. Herb clicks his teeth, visibly offended.

“I keep saying, I don’t have any daddy issues!” He throws up his hands in frustration; BoJack flinches. “Isn’t a guy allowed to make a sitcom without you trying to psychoanalyse it? You don’t see  _ me  _ psychoanalysing your phone calls full of issues where you yell at your mom.”

BoJack’s heart still hasn’t slowed all the way down from the first time it was given reason to start  _ pounding  _ when suddenly it speeds up again. He just barely manages to keep a straight face, but there’s a defensive edge in his voice that’s impossible to hide. “What do you know about my relationship with my mom?!”

“Nothing,” says Herb dryly. “Because I’m not psychoanalysing your phone calls.”

“...Good,” says BoJack. “Because, there’s nothing that I don’t  _ want  _ you to know, it’s just that it would be weird if you  _ did  _ know. Okay?”

“Okay,” says Herb flatly.

“Good. So, don’t start psychoanalysing my phone calls.”

“Never said I was going to.” BoJack is about to make another attempt at responding when Herb, picking up on his obvious discomfort, changes the subject. “So, about my birthday?”

“Yeah, sure, I can make it.”

Herb narrows his eyes. “Do you remember the date?”

BoJack rubs the back of his neck nervously. “Uh…”

“The fifteenth of next month,” says Herb, crossing his arms irritably. “I’ll remind you closer to the actual day, since you’re probably gonna forget again. And because I haven’t really planned it out at all. I’m not even sure what we’re doing yet.” They walk into the filming lot together. “I just know I want my parents to come over.”

BoJack raises an eyebrow. “And if you parents  _ are  _ disowning you, then … ?”

“That’s not gonna happen!”

BoJack almost advises him to have a plan B, but then remembers that it’s in his best interests if Herb forgets entirely about a certain friend who is supposed to be taking him to Disneyland if his mom does end up not speaking to him, so instead he says, “Got a good gut feeling about it, huh?”

Herb frowns. “Gut feeling?”

“Yeah! You know, like, a  _ hunch?”  _ He elbows Herb in the ribs. “Like, you don’t  _ know  _ what’s going on, but you just have a  _ feeling  _ that something’s wrong?”

“Oh yeah, I’ve gotten that a couple times. Usually I ignored it. And…” He gives a strained smile. “And it turned out  _ fine!” _

“You sure?” asks BoJack, raising an eyebrow. When Herb gives a nervous chuckle and looks away from him, he adds, “Dude, you  _ always  _ have to trust your gut! Whenever I have a bad feeling about a girl, she  _ never  _ ends up being a good lay. If you have a bad feeling about someone, you gotta trust that, okay?”

Herb hesitates. “...Yeah. You’re right.”

“Now, don’t you have some scripts to finish? Cause I gotta go get my hair and makeup done.”

“Actually, uh…” He looks up at Bojack hopefully. “Can that wait? I’ve gotta have a quick chat with Sharona.”

“Uh, yeah, sure, it can wait.” He frowns. “What do you need to talk about?”

“Just some … stuff.”

As he walks off in the general direction of the hair and makeup room, BoJack stands in the corridor and freezes.

_ They’re talking shit about you. _

_ Of course they’re talking shit about you! Why else would they even talk other than to bond over how much of a screw-up you are? Your mother was right when she said you’d never have any real friends. _

BoJack suddenly feels very angry at Herb for interrupting him before he could finish his morning beer.

But, he’ll be okay. He can suck it up while Sharona and Herb are  _ talking shit about him,  _ and then steal some of her orange juice on his way out of the hair and makeup room. Maybe while he’s there, he’ll ask what they needed to talk about, anyway. Of course, she won’t  _ say  _ that they’re talking shit about him, even if they probably are, but whatever lie she feeds him will be more reassuring than being left to assume the worst.

And, of course, on the off chance that they’re actually  _ not  _ shit-talking him, well -- if  _ that’s  _ the case, then this will not affect him in anyway.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i feel like all of my bojack fics have chapter 4 be like "this chapter takes place over the span of a couple minutes but it feels like longer because the main character thinks really deeply into every detail" and/or "what happens in this chapter? well, a lot happens, but also nothing"

There’s a hand tugging on his fur, pulling him down.

It’s a little ironic, really. If anyone’s dragging anyone down here, it’s him, the one who’s constantly drowning and never quite able to save himself. He has a string of non-committal girlfriends, or rather, girls that call him their boyfriend and get ghosted before they have a chance to be offended that he doesn’t care about her the same way. Women that he latches onto, like anyone grabs onto the nearest support when they’re drowning, but he just pulls them down with him and abandons them, hoping he doesn’t further damage them doing so. And even worse than the women are the  _ kids,  _ the ones dragged into the industry before they were young enough to think of the consequences, the ones that have to spend their formative years seeing him being, well,  _ BoJack. _

He’s just like his parents.

Joelle tugs on his fur. “Horse…” She looks down guiltily. “I got suspended from high school.”

“Of course you did.” He sighs. “This is all my fault. I was struggling, and I dragged you down with me. You acted out at school because I was stressing you out, and now I’ve ruined your future, and I am so,  _ so  _ sorry.”

Everyone stares at him quizzically.

“Uh … BJ?” says Herb cautiously, frowning. “Your line is, ‘What? What did you do?’”

“...Oh.” Right. A scene. It’s the camera episode, right? He clears his throat and the director calls for him to start again. “What? What did you do?” When Olivia fails to answer, he adds, “Come on, don’t leave me in  _ suspense!” _

“I…” She sighs. “I stole Mike’s camera.”

Mike is a new character invented purely for this episode, one of the many like him who’s bound to be forgotten by both the cast and the fanbase the moment he’s not around to benefit Olivia’s story arc. He’s the one BoJack suggested, with the cool digital camera that makes him so popular, and that makes Olivia jealous.

BoJack can relate, honestly.

Not to the camera part. Digital cameras weren’t a thing when he went to high school, in the late 70s and early 80s, and nobody at his high school ever gave a shit about cameras anyway. Without having photography as an elective, nobody ever had a reason to care about photos beyond sometimes looking at them and privately thinking that they looked nice. But, the popularity part is a whole other story.

BoJack grew up knowing that he was unlovable. He never truly understood  _ why  _ he was unlovable, or what he had possibly done to render him so unworthy of human affection, but he knew that nobody would ever like him. He had his parents to thank for that. And, if nobody would ever like him, why try? Why talk to his classmates in the first place, when the only possible outcome was a harsh rejection, probably accompanied by a circle of laughing and pointing teens like in a cartoon?

His face falls. “Why would you do that?”

That’s the question that sums up his whole life, in a way. Why does he do  _ anything?  _ Why does he still show up for work every day, when he knows he’s a shitty actor and a shittier overall person? Why did he let himself be friends with Herb, when he knew that nobody would ever like him? Why did he even start doing stand-up in the first place? When the only possible outcome was that he would fail and die?

“I wanted to see if he’d taken photos of the bad things he does!” says Olivia defensively.

Pfft. What an idiot. Who takes photos of the bad things they do? Nobody  _ wants  _ to have a constant reminder of their guilt. BoJack would know -- he can’t do  _ anything  _ right. When he does something shitty, which is often, he just buries it down somewhere deep in his soul and hopes if he ignores it, it’ll just go away on its own. It never does, but he manages to cover it up with sufficient alcohol.

He frowns. “Mike’s been doing  _ bad things?”  _ Bad things he supposedly has photo evidence of, too. Who  _ does  _ that? The only person who would willingly document proof of his own failings would be an idiot masochist who loves feeling guilty. Or, worse, a sick bastard who doesn’t see a thing wrong with what they do.

“Well…” mutters Olivia sheepishly. She rubs her arm nervously. “I mean, I don’t  _ know  _ that he did, but --”

“Ah. I see.” He delivers the line perfectly. It’s one he’s thought about a lot -- about the Sherlock-style deduction his character makes. In another work, perhaps, more attention would be drawn to these leaps in logic, to emphasize a character’s genius, but in the sitcom, it’s just a thing people do when it’s convenient for the plot and Herb doesn’t feel like writing out a long scene of wearing them down until they confess. “You’re jealous.”

BoJack sometimes wishes real life was like this sitcom. Because, BoJack is a  _ mess.  _ BoJack drinks way too much and has a near-constant string of women he bangs to numb the pain and  _ hates himself,  _ and a part of him desperately wants to be told that he’s  _ not  _ actually worthless. But, that would require admitting that he thinks he is, and he can’t do that. So, he continues being an obvious wreck, and hopes one day somebody will realise he’s suffering and tell him he’s worth something to  _ them _ . It’s a nice fantasy to hold onto, even though a part of him knows that if someone  _ did  _ say that to him, he probably wouldn’t dare let himself believe them.

“Maybe…” says Olivia guiltily. She huffs loudly and gestures dramatically. “Of  _ course  _ I’m jealous! Mike only  _ just  _ moved here, but everyone already likes him more than me.”

“Aww, come here.” He opens his arms for a hug, and Olivia quickly embraces him. He shudders a little, but nothing that’s likely to be picked up by the cameras. Physical contact is always something a little  _ weird  _ to him, and that goes double for when it’s with fifteen-year-old Joelle, because usually one of his primary reasons for touching another person is to have sex with them. There’s other sources of contact, of course -- the kids disregarding his personal space, Herb playfully ruffling his mane when he fails to get an obvious joke, Sharona cutting his hair -- but never  _ hugs.  _ “Olivia, it’s okay to be upset when someone else is stealing your spotlight, but that doesn’t mean you get to take it out on them!” 

“I’m sorry,” she obviously fake-sobs into his shoulder. “I just didn’t want all my friends to stop liking me because I’m not the most popular girl anymore.”

“Shh, shh, Olivia, it’s okay.” As scripted, she finally pulls away and wipes her eyes. BoJack mentally prepares himself in the split second the action takes, because he’ll basically have to carry this part single-handedly -- Joelle can’t cry at will, so any scene involving her crying just avoids focusing on her face to hide it. “If anyone  _ ever  _ stops being your friend when you’re not as popular, then they were never your friend in the first place.”

She sniffles. “Really?”

“Really,” he confirms. And just like that, the entire issue is solved in twenty-two  _ hilarious  _ minutes.

It’s strange, really. BoJack is no stranger to  _ issues.  _ For about a week now, he’s been secretly waiting for Herb to ask him if he has  _ daddy issues,  _ because he’s thought of this  _ hilarious  _ joke about how actually, it’s more like his dad has  _ son issues.  _ Just off the top of his head, there’s the fact that he totally  _ hates  _ himself, his inability to have a serious girlfriend or even a close friend that he can actually  _ talk  _ to about his problems, his increasingly frequent drinking … the list goes on. 

None of these issues could be resolved in twenty-two  _ hilarious  _ minutes. If they could, maybe his lazy ass would be a little more willing to put the effort in to fix himself. Or maybe not. A part of him’s already accepted that he  _ deserves  _ to be nothing but a sad pile of unhealthy coping methods, and that’s another issue, isn’t it?

“Cut!” yells the director. BoJack’s heart skips a beat, already panicking at the realisation that he did something wrong,  _ of course you did something wrong you’re nothing but a screw-up,  _ but the subsequent call of, “Take five, there’s a lighting issue,” manages to calm him down a little. He straightens up, and does his best grin for the studio audience -- lets them think he’s an asshole in a  _ funny  _ way, instead of just being a dick to everyone who tries to get close to him because he doesn’t know how to handle that. 

“I’ll be in my trailer!”

He starts to comically, performatively storm off, but his stomps grow more serious the further he gets from the studio audience. He’s once again overcome with the urge to  _ get away,  _ and he doesn’t have a clue what he wants to get away  _ from,  _ but the vague sense of impending doom came to him some time in his early childhood after a particularly ruthless fight with his mother and it hasn’t really left him since. 

He’s halfway to his trailer when a sudden touch makes him flinch. It’s Sarah Lynn, tugging on his arm. “BoJack!” She says his name with a sense of urgency, not excitement but worry; but it’s not the childlike worry that comes from a monster under the bed or a creature hiding in the closet, but rather a serious sort of worry, the sort of worry that can only come from an adult telling them they have something to be concerned about. “BoJack!”

He groans. “What do you want?”

“Sharona fell down and got hurt,” she explains anxiously, gnawing on her lower lip. 

“Cool. That sounds like a Sharona problem.”  _ She’s your friend,  _ yells that stupid part of BoJack’s brain, the part that doesn’t understand that there’s no point in having friends or being nice to them because they’ll all just grow to hate him anyway. He ignores it.

“She got hurt  _ bad,”  _ Sarah Lynn elaborates. “She told me to go get a grown-up.”

“Go get another grown-up, then.” He frowns. “Don’t you normally come to Herb for this kind of stuff?”

“Bradley couldn’t find him,” she explains. “Sharona said he’s busy.”

“Busy? Weird, he was watching us shoot just a couple minutes ago. Go get your stepdad, then.”

There’s a flash of  _ something  _ in Sarah Lynn’s eyes, which BoJack willingly ignores. “I can’t find him either.”

“Well, go find another grown-up.” He speed-walks the rest of the way to his trailer, faster than a nine-year-old could reasonably follow him, in the hope that the act of having to run after him will dissuade her and she’ll go off in search of another adult. Just as he’s opening the door, he swears he hears  _ something.  _ He hears it out of the corner of his ear, and he knows that’s an inane thing to think but it really does sound like the audial equivalent to a flash of movement out of the corner of one eye. It’s a barely-perceptible grunt, that seems like it contains a mixture of pain, exhaustion, shock, and  _ anger,  _ and then a  _ thud  _ that he can all-too-easily recognise as the sound of someone being slammed into a wall.

BoJack decides that this is probably somebody else’s problem, and goes into his trailer.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hey guys, if you're gonna read any author's notes, read this one, because this is the chapter that requires this fic to have warnings for rape and underage.
> 
>  **nothing is shown on-screen.** there will be no actual sex scenes in this fanfiction ESPECIALLY not involving underage/nonconsenting characters. however, there will be **mentions** (not described in great detail) of child sexual abuse, child porn, emotional child abuse, child neglect, and verbal sexual harassment of a minor. 
> 
> it's hopefully not going to be too triggering (or at least not much more than canon is) but i want you guys to know what you're getting into before you read this chapter. please be safe!

He always finds it a little _weird_ when people talk about instincts like they’re relics from a prehistoric time -- like they’re all programmed into each species to serve some long-dead purpose. _Instincts_ are things like ears popping up at the first sign of danger and not going back down until he feels safe (which he never does), and neighing when something shocks him so badly that he reacts before he can think it through. Things he was born with, not taught, things that can’t be reprogrammed.

It’s odd, because growing up with abusive parents _does_ reprogram your instincts, leaving him with the _weirdest_ reflexes. Like the way he first flinches and then backs away as subtly as he can if someone moves too fast close to him, or the way he rushes on the defensive if he hears a hint of anger or impatience in someone’s voice, or the way he automatically assumes anyone breathlessly bursting into his trailer and whispering, “Hide me!” with no further explanation must have a good reason for doing so. So, he rolls his eyes at Herb a little, and closes the trailer door once he’s safely inside.

“What’s up?” he whispers expectantly after a pause. Herb ignores him, back against the wall next to the window so he won’t be seen. After a few tense moments, there’s a knock at the door.

“Ugh, what do you want?” says BoJack. He’s only half-acting. He opens the door, carefully so that whoever it is won’t see Herb, and finds himself face-to-face with Richard. “Leave me alone, there’s a lighting issue so I _finally_ get a break.”

Richard frowns. “Have you seen Herb?”

“No. _Why_ would I have seen Herb?” He groans performatively. “I think Sarah Lynn was looking for you earlier. Check the hair and makeup room.” 

Out of the corner of his eye, Herb frantically gestures to him; Richard nods politely and leaves. BoJack shuts the door behind him, then shoots Herb an expectant look.

Herb, of course, chooses _now_ of all times to go quiet. He still stands there, sort of uselessly, not able to meet BoJack’s eye, shaking head to toe. After a few moments, he shakily raises a hand to his mouth, and _retches._

BoJack frowns. “Hey, if you’re gonna puke, don’t do it in _my_ trailer."

“...I’m good,” says Herb, a little unconvincingly. He gulps, then frowns. “Why aren’t you helping Sharona?”

“I didn’t want to,” BoJack explains callously. “Thought somebody else could do it.”

“... _Wow.”_ He forces a nervous chuckle that dissolves into a sort of worried groan. “Thank _God_ you’re such an asshole, BJ.”

“How’d you know she got hurt, anyway?”

“She didn’t.” He’s out of breath, both physically and emotionally, and he has to gulp down several breaths before he can say anything longer than a few words. “I, I got her to fake it, to cause a distraction…”

“Oh my God.” He groans. “Did you do that stupid sitcom thing where you steal ideas from your own writing and look through Richard’s camera?”

Herb’s only answer is a meek nod. 

“And then,” says BoJack, irritably but hopefully. “You discovered, like Olivia in the show, that there’s nothing wrong, and that assuming makes a real ass out of you, but now Richard is predictably mad at you for going through his shit?”

Herb shakes his head, still trembling. “BJ, he has -- _pictures --”_ He gags on the word. “-- of Sarah Lynn.”

“Yes,” says BoJack irritably. “He has pictures of his stepdaughter, who he loves. That is a normal thing that people do.” 

“No, I meant -- BJ, he has _sexual_ pictures.”

BoJack swears his heart skips a beat. The floor underneath him moves up and down, like waves on the ocean. “...Of Sarah Lynn?”

“Mm-hmm.”

“Oh my God.” 

Herb takes a deep, shuddering breath. He starts pacing around the room, his arms shaking uncontrollably as the stress carves lines into his forehead. He says in that same breathless, shaken voice, “We have to call the police,” and BoJack can’t tell _why_ that pisses him off so much.

“Wait,” he says, cautiously and yet urgently at the same time. He’s frowning deeply. Herb turns to him expectantly. 

“Wait for _what?”_

“I don’t know,” he says defensively. “I just -- I think we need to think of a plan, before we do anything. Like, is it actually legal to look through his camera like that? We might need to find another way to get evidence if we want this to work out in court.”

“Oh shit, you’re right.” His pacing doubles in speed as he tugs on the receding edge of his own hair. “He’s probably still on edge after he caught me looking through it. If we’re gonna trick him into confessing, this might be our best chance for a while.”

“Wait, no.” He can’t for the life of him figure out why he’s so desperate to postpone this legal battle, because of course he _does_ want that bastard locked up, he _does,_ but the idea of it happening _now_ makes his heart skip a beat. “You, you should rest for a bit before you do anything, okay? You look really shaken.”

 _“I’m_ shaken?!” chokes Herb. Despite the fact that he clearly is, he just shakes his head and says, “If I’m this messed up from just _seeing_ it, how the hell do you think she feels?!”

And _that,_ BoJack thinks, is the moment that makes it click.

His features harden. He leans against a nearby wall and gives Herb a positively _challenging_ look, and says, like he’s _daring_ him to answer, “And?”

“... _And?”_ repeats Herb incredulously, looking offended. “BJ, this is -- this could mess her up! For _life!”_

“So?” says BoJack callously. “That just _happens._ Some people just draw the short straw, and they end up super messed up forever because of their shitty parents. That happens to _loads_ of kids, and they just have to put up with it -- what’s so _special_ about Sarah Lynn that she gets a free ticket out?”

Herb stares at him, frowning. Then he sighs and pinches the bridge of his nose. “Oh my God. So _that’s_ why you feel weird about this.”

“What do you mean?” snaps BoJack defensively.

Herb grimaces. “Look, uh, BJ, I know you didn’t have the best childhood…”

BoJack freezes. His heart skips several beats. “...How do you know that?”

“...Because I’m not a total _idiot?!”_ he suggests. He throws up his hands in frustration. “I swear to God, it’s like, I don’t know, it’s -- Jesus, BJ, what do you _want?!”_

BoJack flinches. “What?”

“You are _constantly_ asking for attention! _Constantly!”_ Herb’s actual voice is a little higher pitched than BoJack’s, but it still rises an octave when he’s mocking him, as is the tradition with imitations. _“Oh, look at me, I can’t stop drinking because I’m so messed up! Ha ha, I have sex with every woman under the sun because I don’t know how to feel loved! Everybody, pay attention to me, I freeze up when people ask if I have daddy issues but go ahead and ask them if they do anyway!_ But _then,”_ he continues, gesturing wildly. “You don’t _accept_ the attention we give you! I have asked if you want to talk about your parents, _so many times,_ but you just get pissed off and change the subject! And now you’re using it as an excuse to let a _child_ be sexually abused? What the _hell,_ BJ?!”

BoJack spends a long time just plain old _gaping_ in lieu of a response to that, because, well, Herb is _right._ His first impulse is to get defensive, to pick a fight and yell until Herb storms off, but even to a man that self-sabotages any serious platonic or romantic relationship, the idea of pushing away his only friend is a little terrifying. So, he takes a deep breath so he won’t get mad, and says, “...You’re right.”

“No shit, Sherlock.” Herb is still a little angry. “I just -- I don’t _get_ it, BJ. You clearly want attention, but you don’t let us _give_ you attention. What do you _want?”_

“...I want to be _happy,”_ he admits. He can’t make himself look Herb in the eye, or even really in the general facial area. “And, I don’t know how. And I tell myself that if people give me attention in the right ways, it’ll be in the key in the lock that _fixes_ me, so I act out and make a big show of how I’m _suffering,_ but I’m scared of actually _getting_ the attention, because then I’ll have to accept that nobody can fix me just by saying the right words.”

He manages to find the courage to look up at Herb, just for a second. What he sees isn’t the anger that makes him scared, but something even worse -- _pity._ The mere _idea_ of someone giving a shit about him, enough to feel sorry for the shit he’s been through, is foreign to him in a way that makes him feel guilty for daring to allow it. “Jesus, BJ, I’m so sorry.”

He looks down at his feet guiltily. “I’ve never actually been _raped,”_ he explains. “But, I had a pretty close call once. In the eighth grade -- I botched a choir solo, so my mom gave me the silent treatment, and I had to choose between walking home for _hours_ and probably getting lost, or getting a lift home with a known rapist.”

Herb tilts his head slightly. “And you chose the rapist?”

“Yeah, like an idiot. I don’t know _why_ he didn’t touch me. He could have, there was nothing stopping him, but he just -- _didn’t._ I mean, he _said_ some gross stuff, and sort of generally made me feel like he’d do it if he got a chance again, but he never laid a hand on me. My mom just said it was because _nobody_ wants me.” His eyes widen. “Shit, maybe _that’s_ why I have so much sex. You know, so I can feel like somebody _wants_ me.”

“Uh, maybe. I dunno. Can adults mess you up sexually without actually _raping_ you?” His leg starts bouncing.

“I don’t know. They can sure mess you up emotionally.” He forces a chuckle. “My, my mom and dad, they -- they told me I was unlovable, and nobody would ever like me, and they should have aborted me. A lot. And I sort of grew up just _accepting_ that I’m worthless, and I would never amount to anything, and -- and now that I _have_ amounted to something, I thought it would make me feel better, but I just feel the same.” He takes a deep breath and starts pacing. “And --”

“BJ.” The voice is calm, yet assertive. Herb holds up an open palm to get him to stop. “Look, I get that you need to vent, and I get that I’m probably the first person in … a _while …_ that you’ve felt like you could vent to. But, in case you hadn’t noticed, I’m still kinda shaken up by that whole thing where I accidentally saw _child porn,_ of a child that I _know,_ and -- and if I have to keep hearing about _your_ awful childhood as well then I’m just gonna burst into tears. And I mean, then _you’ll_ have to comfort _me,_ and -- and it’ll all be a huge mess. So … ?”

“Oh. Yeah, I’ll shut up. Sorry for dumping all that on you.” It’s a simple boundary -- assertive, but not rude or unfair. It still sort of makes BoJack feel like he’s being personally attacked.

“And, I’m really sorry that there was nobody to help you when you were a kid, but -- but do you really think other kids should have to go through that, just because you did? Don’t you want to _avoid_ other kids suffering like you did? Like you still do?”

BoJack hesitates, but ultimately sighs. “Yeah, you’re right. We’d better call the cops.” 

“No shit, Sherlock. You _really_ thought it’d be okay to just _let_ her get abused?”

BoJack’s face falls. He forces a nervous chuckle. “I’m a real jerk, huh?”

“Yeah, but you’re honest, straight-forward, not fake nice, and don’t beat around the bush. Your heart is tender, so you protect it from people, but sometimes you open up a wall and it’s _incredible._ You’re doing the best you can, considering your asshole parents.” He manages a small, strained smile. “Plus, if you weren’t such a dick that you heard Sharona was hurt and decided it was _somebody else’s problem,_ then there’d be nobody here to lie to Richard about where I am, and the whole plan would have been screwed.”

BoJack manages a small smile. “...Yeah.”

“That said, don’t get into the habit of being a huge asshole all the time just in case it ends up benefiting you. That’s a dick move.” He sighs. “We’d better go out and -- and do this.”

“God, I don’t even know where to start.” He leans against the wall, frowning deeply. “I mean, I know we’ve gotta call the police, but -- where’s Sarah Lynn gonna stay, while they’re working all the legal stuff out? Where’s she gonna stay _after_ they’ve worked all the legal stuff out? Her mom’s probably in on it, or at least not bothering to do anything about it. Plus, I’m _terrified_ that the sick bastard’s gonna do worse to her when he knows he’s in danger of being locked up. And, what if he gets off? That’ll just make everything worse for her.”

“Jesus, I don’t know. I don’t know how any of this is going to work out. I think we just have to call the cops and hope they sort it out.” He takes a deep breath. His hand rests uncertainly on the door knob. “Can you come out with me?”

BoJack raises an eyebrow. “Hmm?”

“He was pretty pissed off. When he caught me going through his camera. Slammed me into a wall and everything. And, and if he finds me before I can get to a phone, then -- then I guess one of us’ll have to fight him to keep him distracted, or something.” 

The shudder in his shoulders seems to clearly indicate that he rathers it’d be BoJack doing the physical fighting. BoJack hesitates. “...Yeah. I’ll fight him off. And, if it comes to it, we grab Sarah Lynn and run.”

“That’s kidnapping, BJ.”

“Not if it’s just to keep her safe while we’re getting the asshole locked up.”

“I mean, it still might get us in legal trouble, but -- if it comes to it, yeah.” He opens the door, then pauses. “Oh, and, BJ?”

“Yeah?”

“I know I said I can’t hear it _right now,_ but -- if you ever need to talk to someone about your parents -- let me know, okay?”

BoJack forces a smile. “Yeah, I will.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> would you guys believe this was the chapter that started this whole fic? the original idea for this fic was that it would be a one-shot fix-it fic where bojack didnt get herb fired, and because of that herb was able to out sarah lynn's stepdad as the bastard he is and get that poor kid somewhere safe. of course then i started getting ideas for other scenes and i realised it would be way too long/heavy to remain as a one-shot. 
> 
> btw i might not get a chapter out tomorrow because im working in the afternoon/evening so i'll basically only have 5ish hours in which to write.


	6. Chapter 6

The thing is, there’s got to be  _ some  _ truth to Herb’s regular reminders that they’re a  _ family. _

BoJack always rolls his eyes when he says that. Family is a  _ shitfest,  _ and recent events have done nothing but reinforce that fact in BoJack’s mind. But, the thing is,  _ Horsin’ Around  _ is  _ also  _ a massive shitfest, and, just like when he had the misfortune of growing up with his parents, every misstep results in him getting yelled at and there’s not a single word that can be said that won’t potentially result in a fight.

But, just like with his  _ actual  _ family, as he has the misfortune of knowing from his several attempts to run away as a child, everybody notices quickly if someone doesn’t show up where and when they should.

Joelle and Bradley take turns glancing toward the door. They both seem a little anxious, making regular checks of the clock, but neither of them say anything. The chaos of the previous day was kept to an absolute minimum since the episode only barely featured Sabrina, and the other kids’ awareness of the issue was limited to a rumour that there were police outside at one point, which wasn’t even that uncommon anyway what with BoJack being, well,  _ BoJack.  _ But now they’re staring at the door, waiting for Sarah Lynn, and nobody’s quite sure how to break it to them that she’s taking at least a week off.

You’d think they would know, really. The pilot episode was the only episode to not even have a mention of the kids’ school, or the horse’s work. The explanation for this, which was delivered after Joelle asked why the kids weren’t at school and Herb stared at her in stunned silence for a good five and a half seconds, was that they needed time off to get used to their new family.

Herb pinches the bridge of his nose. “God, I don’t know how I’m gonna explain this to them.”

“I’ll tell Joelle if you can tell Bradley,” BoJack suggests grimly.

“Yeah,” says Herb numbly. “Sure.” He gulps. “Thanks, BJ.”

BoJack nods vaguely toward him, then takes a step toward the kids. “...Hey, Joelle?”

Joelle looks up. “Oh, hey, BoJack. Have you heard from Sarah Lynn’s parents? She’s running pretty late.”

BoJack grimaces. After a moment of hesitation, he sighs and opens the door. “Okay, so, uh, Joelle, uh -- let’s go for a walk.”

* * *

It’s a remarkably  _ easy  _ conversation, all things considered. The most intense thing he feels, other than the intense awkwardness that he expected, is a twinge of guilt at the way he deliberately picked the easier conversation and left Herb with the presumably much more emotionally and mentally draining task of talking to Bradley. Joelle’s only a few years older than him, but they’re three particularly  _ important  _ years; Joelle can be relied upon to at least have the necessary vocabulary to understand the conversation, without necessitating another several explanations of what abuse is and why it’s bad and how sex is more complicated than a penis sliding in and out of a vagina until a baby appears.

“Okay, so,” he begins, as they walk around the outside of the parking lot. Joelle looks up at him expectantly. “So, the thing is, Sarah Lynn’s stepdad was sexually abusing her.”

Joelle gasps aloud. “Oh my God.”

“Yeah. So, uh, that’s a thing.”

He can’t tell if the absolutely  _ appalled  _ look of shock on her face is from his callousness or just the general horror of the situation. “Is she okay?!”

“Yeah, yeah, she’s -- she’s good. As good as things can get, I mean. Herb found out yesterday, and he called the police, and -- she’s gonna have to testify against him in court soon, which is gonna be really hard for everyone involved. But, things are good for now, I guess. She’s just taking a few weeks off from the show because she needs to get used to her new foster parents.”

“Foster parents?” She tilts her head, frowning. “What about her mom?”

“She’s, uh, been deemed unfit for parenting. She might have to go to court, too. The authorities think she must have been pretty neglectful to have not noticed anything happening in her own house, and Sarah Lynn said some stuff that kinda made them think she was emotionally abusive, too.” He clears his throat nervously. “This is probably best, anyway. I mean, would you want to be stuck with your mom who married your rapist? You’d just be constantly reminded of how much she failed to protect you.”

“Jesus,” says Joelle. BoJack isn’t sure why. It’s not like Jesus is going to help them.

“She’s, uh -- she’s gonna be okay. I think, anyway. But, she’s been through a lot, and she needs a really good friend right now.” He looks her in the eye. “Can you do that?”

Joelle gives him a determined nod. “Mm-hmm.”

* * *

Talking to Bradley is evidently a little harder, judging by the tear tracks on Herb’s face when they meet back up in the hair and makeup room. “God, I’m a mess,” he murmurs, leaning against a wall and pinching the bridge of his nose. “He promised he’d be her friend and help her feel better, and I just started crying. You know, like an idiot.” He takes a deep breath. “It’s like -- you know how when you’re a kid, and you just feel so  _ big?  _ Like, you just think being twelve is  _ basically  _ an adult, and you’re so  _ grown-up  _ and responsible and you’re gonna pass math class so you can go to Disneyland, and, and --” He sniffles. “And then you grow up, and you meet twelve-year-olds, and they’re just -- he’s only a few years older than her. He’s just a kid.”

_ “She’s  _ just a kid,” says Sharona. 

BoJack starts pacing around the room, shaking his head in disgust. “What a sick bastard.”

“Sarah Lynn’s strong. She’ll get through this.”

“She shouldn’t  _ have  _ to be strong. She’s only  _ nine,  _ Sharona.”

“She’ll be okay. Her new foster parents are getting her set up with a therapist. That should help.”

BoJack remains silent for a long time. “...A  _ therapist?”  _ He groans. “Oh God, she’s  _ super  _ messed up.”

Herb frowns. “Going to therapy doesn’t mean you have to be  _ super messed up,  _ or something. It just means she’s been through some shit and she needs someone she can talk to about it.”

_ “Talk?!”  _ he scoffs. “Why would you  _ talk  _ about your feelings? I just bottle everything up, and one day I won’t have to worry about it because I’ll be dead.”

Herb silently nods in agreement. Sharona frowns. “You’re not gonna die for, like, sixty years.”

“It won’t be that long if I keep drinking my own body weight in ‘orange juice’.” He says those last two words with a knowing eyebrow raised toward Sharona and a smirk that he can’t wipe off his face, and then he takes it upon himself to steal some of her orange juice. He gulps it down gratefully. Herb frowns.

“Okay, I know you might get fired if the execs can tell you’ve got alcohol around kids, but is it  _ really  _ a good idea to disguise it as something that the kids might want to drink? At least pick, I dunno, a soft drink nobody likes.” 

“There’s no such thing as a  _ soft drink nobody likes,”  _ says Sharona. “I use orange juice because everyone thinks it’s for  _ kids.  _ And, weirdly, the kids actually leave it alone if you tell them to, while the other adults hear that you’ve got a drink they want and start  _ helping themselves.”  _ She glares at BoJack. “Even if they’re a super rich actor. And of course, they  _ never  _ pay me back.”

BoJack takes another juice box. It approximately matches him in self-awareness.

Herb sighs and starts fishing around in his pockets. He pulls out a twenty dollar bill and slaps it onto the bench. “That should cover a box or two.” He hesitantly removes one of the boxes from its plastic casing and uses the attached straw to stab a whole into the top. He takes a long sip from the box. He looks at BoJack. BoJack smirks.

“Drinking a triangle, are you?”

Herb spits out his juice.

“That happened  _ one  _ time!” he protests. “And, I  _ do  _ know what a triangle is. I just forgot that one time!” BoJack gives him a look. “I -- I mean, I didn’t  _ forget  _ what a triangle is! I just, I, I forgot how to figure out the  _ area  _ of a triangle! Totally different.” His face turns a very bright shade of red as Sharona and BoJack continue to stare at him. “And, and I was in a rush at the time, because I was focusing on writing, and I wasn’t too focused on the math, and -- and, hey, I already had to spend a whole  _ year  _ doing seventh grade math! It was a shitty year. I don’t want to do that again!”

“Whatever you say, Herb,” replies BoJack between sips of what is ostensibly orange juice. 

Herb glares. “Like  _ you  _ remember anything from school either. You  _ never  _ get my Shakespeare references!” He throws up his hands in frustration. “A plague o’ both your houses! I am  _ sped.  _ Is he gone, and hath nothing?”

BoJack blinks. “Uh, what?”

“He’s quoting Shakespeare,” whispers Sharona. 

Herb crosses his arms smugly. “No, ‘tis not so deep as a well nor so wide as a church-door, but ‘tis enough, ‘twill serve. Ask for me tomorrow, and you shall find me a  _ grave  _ man. I am  _ peppered,  _ I warrant, for this world. A plague o’ both your houses! Zounds, a dog, a rat, a mouse, a  _ cat  _ to scratch a man to death! A braggart, a rogue, a villain that fights by  _ the book of arithmetic!  _ Why the  _ devil  _ came you between us? I was hurt under your arm.”

Sharona stares at him. “Do -- do you have the entire script memorised?”

“Only the scenes with Romeo,” answers Herb smugly. “Because I had a crush on him in the tenth grade, and I had this theory that the reason he fell in love with Rosaline and Juliet at first sight and then stopped caring about Rosaline was so quickly was because he was gay and didn’t realise it yet.”

“You seriously think he didn’t  _ actually  _ like Juliet? He  _ literally  _ killed himself over it.”

“Have you  _ been  _ a gay kid? Gay Romeo would  _ totally  _ kill himself.”

BoJack straightens up. “Okay, this is starting to get a little heavy.” He takes another long sip of what is ostensibly orange juice. “Besides, I don’t know anything about Romeo and Juliet. My tenth grade class studied Macbeth.”

“What, and you only studied  _ one  _ book in the tenth grade?” chokes Herb. “And you only read classic literature when you had to for a class? Never just sat down and read a Sherlock Holmes book? I think you’d like the first short story in  _ The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes.” _

“Never heard of it, don’t care.”

“But, the curious incident of --”

“Nope, sorry, not interested.”

Herb groans. “How can you have  _ never  _ read any classic literature? What rock have you been living under?!”

Sharona drinks more ostensible orange juice. A deep frown carves lines into her forehead. She takes a deep breath and leans against the counter. “...Guys?” Herb and BoJack turn to face her. There’s something ironically sobering about the way she finishes the orange juice and tosses the box into a nearby trash can, and they’re dead silent until she finally murmurs, “This, this talk about reading stuff in high school, it, it got me thinking. How much of her education do you think Sarah Lynn missed out on? While her teacher was … you know …”

Herb pales. “God, I don’t know.” He pinches the bridge of his nose. “I should have done more to protect her.”

BoJack places a hand on his shoulder. “You were the one who could tell something was up with her stepdad.”

“And I didn’t do anything! Not until yesterday. I, I  _ wanted  _ to, but I kept second-guessing myself, because, I mean, I didn’t want to be just accusing the guy of random bullshit for no reason if I  _ was  _ just being paranoid. God, I wish I’d done something sooner.” He looks guiltily at his feet, taking several deep breaths, and it’s evident he’s devoting a lot of effort to the act of not bursting into tears on the spot. The room is eerily quiet for a long time.

Herb clears his throat. “You’d better go out.” His voice is unsteady. “Filming starts soon.”

“Yeah, I guess,” says BoJack, taking a step away from Herb. He frowns. “What time is it?”

“Time to get a watch,” Herb jokes, but there’s no humour in his voice. “Since, y’know, that’s the only portable timekeeping device in 1993.” He silently turns his wrist so BoJack can see the watch he’s wearing. BoJack twists his neck to read it.

“We’ve got a bit of time left. Enough for us to go out to my car, at least.”

Sharona raises an eyebrow. “What are we gonna find in your car?”

“Oh, you know, just…” He forces a grin. “You know, I’m not  _ totally  _ living under a rock in terms of classic literature. Like -- look! Out that window!” He points at a complete stranger that happens to be walking past through a window.

Sharona stares. “It’s … a bird.”

“Yeah.” He finishes off his orange juice. “And, I think it’s a mockingbird.” He callously tosses the empty box into a trash can. “So let’s go get some tequila.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> fun fact: the first story of "The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes" (which herb recommends to bojack) is called The Adventure of Silver Blaze and its about a famous horse


	7. Chapter 7

The best ideas always come with an absurd amount of liquid.

There’s a reason Herb came up with the brilliant idea to take his notebook into the shower with him, and a reason why the first idea he came up with outside of the shower resulted in a soggy notebook. There’s just  _ something  _ about the inherent  _ nothingness  _ of showering, about the way people tend to go into autopilot halfway through washing their hair and let their minds wander freely.

BoJack has heard this perfectly reasonable explanation several times, and each time he ignores it in favour of insisting blindly that all liquids have  _ magical idea powers. _

And, it  _ does  _ work. BoJack knows that. BoJack came up with a  _ great  _ idea in the shower once, but Herb turned it down, and paired it with a handful of baseless accusations that all of his ideas were “stupid and racist”, despite the pressing fact that he  _ never  _ said they were  _ all  _ thieves. Not to mention, that time he came up with a  _ great  _ unique and family-friendly explanation for Ethan’s orphan status, when the tropes of dead parents and junkie parents were already taken by Sabrina and Olivia, while his mom was trying to drown him in 1986. Herb actually  _ listened  _ to that one, and  _ thanked  _ him in a way that made his cheeks heat up for the next week. And, most of all, his _ best  _ ideas come late into Friday night drinks with Sharona, or after he’s poured several miscellaneous pills into a bowl, then added alcohol and eaten the resulting overdose hazard with a spoon like cereal.

Herb, weirdly,  _ never  _ likes the ideas he comes up with when he’s shitfaced drunk.

“And I’m  _ telling  _ you,” he insists bitterly, taking it upon himself to take Sharona’s juice boxes. “It was a good idea!”

“Mm-hmm,” says Sharona blankly. “What did Herb say, again?”

“Oh, he was a total  _ dick  _ about it. Didn’t even want to hear me out! He just said, ‘Oh, and what’s your next great idea? Putting Ethan in a watermelon suit so you can make fat jokes about him?’ It was, like,  _ newsflash,  _ idiot, watermelons aren’t a Halloween food.”

Sharona tilts her head to one side, frowning. “Wait, so the idea was a Halloween episode? It’s not even October.”

“I’m telling you, it was literary  _ genius.”  _ He crosses his arms and pouts. “I should have let him get fired. The execs told me, if they had to let Herb go, you know who they’d replace him with? Danny Bananas! I bet Danny Bananas would have put Olivia in a pumpkin suit.” 

“Yeah, well, we don’t have Danny Bananas.”

“Pity, too. I bet Danny would join us drinking from our  _ triangular  _ boxes.” He sips from the rectangular juice box that he stole from Sharona, then frowns. “No, it’s no point. Bullying Herb is no fun when he’s not here to get all stupid and defensive.”

Sharona raises an eyebrow. “Why would you want to bully Herb?”

“We’re  _ men,  _ Sharona. Bullying each other is how we bond. Where  _ is  _ Herb, anyway? Usually my lunch break is my designated ‘drink orange juice and bully Herb’ time. It’s no fun if I don’t get to bully Herb.”

“I dunno, have you checked his office?”

“It’s locked. I tried knocking on the door and he didn’t answer, but he might have just not heard me over all the tap dancing. Maybe he went home early?”

“He could have. He seemed a little …  _ off  _ this morning.” 

BoJack frowns. “Hmm?”

“I don’t know, his voice sounded different. He was kinda shaky? I thought maybe he was sick.”

“...Oh.”

BoJack, for the  _ life  _ of him,  _ cannot  _ figure out why that makes him feel so  _ shitty. _

This is nothing unusual. It basically defined his relationship with Sarah Lynn for the last three years, and it’s happened with Sharona more times than he can count -- his friend, someone he cared about, was upset, or sick, or otherwise  _ not quite right.  _ And, the people around him could figure it out, no problem, everyone else could notice it, but he just didn’t  _ notice  _ that the  _ only person he cared about needed him.  _ And, yeah, reviewing the morning could reveal the obvious signs, he  _ was  _ a little irritable about the pumpkin Olivia idea, moreso than he would be usually, and he  _ did  _ go through a weirdly large amount of cigarettes in the five minute walk to the set from his car, but BoJack didn’t notice any of that at the time, because, well, he  _ didn’t. _

This is normal. This is  _ completely  _ normal. This, right here, is a total  _ classic BoJack moment --  _ of  _ course  _ he was too stupid and too unobservant and too busy fetishizing his own sadness to notice his friend was acting weird. What  _ else  _ would he do? He  _ is  _ BoJack Horseman, after all. But what  _ isn’t  _ normal is the disproportionate guilt pulsing through his veins.

“Maybe I should look for him,” he says.

“If you want,” says Sharona.

“I’ve just gotta piss first. And then, there’s a couple minutes left in the lunch break. I’ll ask around, see if he’s okay. It’s gonna be a pain in the ass if he takes a sick day tomorrow -- I still haven’t gotten down my tone for the third scene we’re shooting tomorrow. And Herb’s the only one who knows what he’s writing! The director always calls the  _ worst  _ shots.”

BoJack tells himself that  _ that’s  _ the reason he cares so much.

* * *

He’s barely halfway down the hallway, but he’s already halfway through a mental list of where he’s going to check once he’s out of the bathroom. First, he’ll make the quick trip to that park near the filming lot, the one the kids go to have fun during the breaks. Joelle  _ grew out  _ of it a few years back, just after her thirteenth birthday, but Herb managed to talk her into going again after Sarah Lynn came back to filming, just to make sure Bradley didn’t hurt her by accident or anything. Turns out, fifteen-year-olds actually  _ do  _ enjoy playing at parks with preteens, once they’re not so determined to be  _ grown-ups. _

Then, he thinks as he gets closer to the bathroom, he’ll swing by Herb’s office again, and knock on the door a little louder this time. He’ll look a bit stupid banging on the door of an empty office, but there’s every chance Herb will be in there, and he’ll have to knock loud to be heard over the incessant tapdancing. As he pushes the bathroom door open, he’s internally praising his own willingness to make this small sacrifice of potentially looking like a bit of an idiot to people who he will never interact with again, and --  _ oh. _

_...Oh. _

...Oh  _ shit. _

“...Herb?” 

Herb visibly jolts at the sound of his voice, and swivels around to face him from his previous position leaning on the sink. “Oh! BJ, I, uh, didn’t expect to see you there.” He gives a forced, nervous chuckle.

BoJack frowns. “I was wondering where you were. How long have you been in here for?” He takes a closer look at Herb’s face and his eyes widen. “Holy shit, have you been crying?”

“Yeah, well…” He turns away from BoJack and pinches the bridge of his nose. He closes his eyes and takes several deep breaths before he finally murmurs, “I’m sorry, I just -- I’ve had a really shitty day.”

BoJack nearly says something dickish and unnecessary about how it must be nice to have days that  _ aren’t  _ shitty. Instead, he says, “Hey, I get it.”

“Thanks, BJ.” He sniffles. BoJack stares at him for several moments.

“So, uh,” he finally mutters. “Should, should I piss while you freak out, or would that be too awkward?”

Herb nearly gets physical whiplash from how quickly he turns his head to gape at BoJack incredulously, and emotional whiplash from how quickly what he expected to be a good vent session turned into toilet humour. “...Sorry?”

“Hey, don’t blame me. I came in here to piss. Not my fault you were here.” After a pause, he adds, “Hey, I’ve been in bathrooms with people who did  _ way  _ weirder things than cry, it’s really no biggie.”

“Oh my God,” says Herb, smacking himself in the head. “Yeah. Sure. Piss. I won’t look.” He turns away from the urinals and focuses on a specific spot in the mirror. BoJack turns away from him and unzips his pants.

“So, what’s up?” he asks, after a pause. 

Herb frowns. “Is this really a conversation we want to have  _ while you’re peeing?” _

“Well, when else?”

“In, like, thirty seconds? When you’re done?” He groans. “Oh, let’s just do it. Basically, my birthday’s this weekend, and everything I had planned is  _ ruined,  _ in the  _ worst  _ possible way.”

BoJack looks up. “Hmm?”

“My boyfriend dumped me. Over the  _ dumbest  _ thing! He said I was too ‘all over the place’. What does that even  _ mean?!” _

“Oh yeah, I had an ex dump me for something like that a while back. It was the  _ worst.  _ I mean, I wasn’t exactly planning for it to be long-term, but -- still sucks, you know?”

“That’s not even the worst part.” He slams his head into the mirror. “My mom  _ finally  _ picked up the phone, just to tell me she’s sick of me trying to call her because she doesn’t want anything to do with me now that I’m a ‘perverted sinner’. Who  _ does  _ that? She went to all that work to adopt me just to  _ un-adopt  _ me over  _ nothing?” _

“That sounds awful.” He tries to say what he thinks Herb would say to him, if their roles were reversed, to hide the fact that he doesn’t have a clue how to comfort people. “I’m really sorry about John--”

“John was the last one. It’s Jack that dumped me over the stupid thing. Aren’t you gonna wash your hands?”

“Don’t need to,” BoJack insists, strutting over to the sink and leaning on it. “My dick is perfectly clean.”

“I highly doubt that.” He groans. “I just -- the only reason I wanted to have a birthday party in the first place was to introduce Jack to my parents. What’s the  _ point,  _ if none of them are gonna be there? There’s my friends, I guess, but…” He gulps. “I mean, they’re all gonna leave eventually, too. Everybody’s gonna leave me.”

“That’s not true,” says BoJack automatically, purely because it’s what he’d want Herb to say to him. “I mean,  _ I’m  _ not gonna leave you.”

Herb folds his arms across his body defensively and turns his back to BoJack. “That’s nice, BJ.” He sighs. “Look, I really appreciate how you’re trying to help here, but -- but I just need some time alone. And you’re gonna have to go back to filming soon. I’ll be out in a bit, okay?”

BoJack hesitates. “...Yeah, okay. I’ll leave you alone.” He pushes the bathroom door open. It’s a rectangle. He briefly considers making some quip about that, where the punchline is Herb’s supposed inability to differentiate between triangles and rectangles, but decides against it upon remembering that, now more than ever, it’s in his best interests if Herb forgets entirely about a certain friend who was meant to be taking him to Disneyland in the event of his parents disowning him. 

Then, he remembers that, his own best interests aside, it’s in  _ Herb’s  _ best interests to remember. So, he takes a deep breath, and says, in an uncharacteristic show of selflessness, “So, uh -- this weekend?”

Herb turns to him, frowning. “Huh?”

“Well, I  _ said  _ I’d take you to Disneyland if your mom disowned you. Because she never took you after she said she would for passing seventh grade math. And, I mean, this isn’t the week that I’m meant to be drinking with Sharona on Friday, and you don’t know what you’re doing for your birthday, so…”

The beam on Herb’s face could light up a city at night -- and if it was just a little brighter, maybe it could illuminate the darkest parts of BoJack’s heart, too. “You’re serious?”

“Of course I am,” says BoJack, grinning. “I  _ told  _ you I would.”

“I know, but -- I didn’t think you’d follow through.”

“Neither did I, but then you got all sad and I felt guilty. So, uh -- how about, um, I swing by your house about an hour after work on Friday to pick you up, and then we can spend the weekend there? I’ll pay, of course.”

Herb looks like he’s close to crying actual  _ tears  _ of joy. “Wow. Yeah, that sounds amazing. Thank you so much, BJ.”

“It’s -- it’s really nothing. I didn’t have plans this weekend.” He turns to leave, then turns back, frowning. “Oh, but, uh, Herb?”

“Yeah?”

“We’re -- we’re just going as friends, right?”

Herb laughs, then waves his concern off. “Yeah, totally platonic. I mean, if the media finds out, they’ll be rumours, but -- but  _ we’ll  _ know it’s platonic. And that’s the important part, right?”

“Yeah,” says BoJack. “I’d better get back on set.”

So, he walks off. He walks  _ fast,  _ so he won’t get yelled at for being late back from his lunch break again, and so he won’t have to think about the fact that some part of him, the  _ stupidest goddamn part of him,  _ is  _ disappointed  _ that it’s purely platonic. Because, there is  _ no  _ reason for him to feel that way, since he does  _ not  _ have feelings for Herb. Not romantic, not sexual, and not even platonic. He’s not even  _ friends  _ with Herb. He doesn’t know  _ why  _ he just volunteered to waste a perfectly good weekend on goddamned Disneyland, when he  _ could  _ be spending that valuable time on feeling sorry for himself or getting drunk.

BoJack is already  _ far  _ too busy with exploits such as acting and wallowing in his own misery to analyse his own feelings about Herb. He barely has time to do the stupid Disneyland trip, let alone figure out  _ why  _ he decided to do it. So, like with most of his feelings, he decides he’ll just bottle it all up until it inevitably becomes someone else’s problem.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> might not get a chapter out tomorrow because my plan is that the next one will be a little longer than usual
> 
> also i am 100% sure that bojack is the sort of person who would refuse to wash his hands after peeing because he's convinced his dick is clean and this is the hill i will die on


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i did warn you guys that this was gonna have a handful of long chapters

Everything goes according to plan.

Friday afternoon, they blast songs from the 70s through the radio in BoJack’s car as they drive over to Disneyland. Herb rants at great length about he’s not  _ old  _ for still liking music from when he was a kid, really, he’s technically not even thirty-two yet, but if he’s going to get excited about a theme park like he used to when he was just a kid, then, well, shouldn’t he get to listen to music from when he was a kid? 

BoJack just nudges him in the ribs and says, “Okay, but you’re old.”

Herb pouts. “I’m only three years older than you.”

“Yeah, but it was the sixties. They were  _ long  _ years.”

By the time they check in on Friday night it’s a little too late to go on any of the rides or really do much of anything, but they do manage to move their bags into the hotel room and have a nice dinner. Herb carefully unpacks his stuff and puts it into the drawers; BoJack just tears whatever he needs out of his bag and tosses it in a corner when he no longer needs it. “We’re only gonna be here for two nights, what’s the point of unpacking?”

Herb raises an eyebrow. “How long do you have to stay somewhere before you should try to make it look nice?”

_ “Nine  _ days, minimum!”

Perhaps, if their life was a sitcom -- not one like  _ Horsin’ Around,  _ but aimed at a slightly older audience -- then some bizarre mix-up would have happened resulting in them being assigned to a room with only one bed, and instead of asking a manager to fix that up they would have to just sleep together, despite ostensibly having no feelings for each other. But, their life is not a sitcom. So, they go to sleep in their separate beds.

Saturday morning, Herb is counting down the hours from the moment he wakes up, doing the mental math to see how long it is until midnight as he eats his breakfast -- maple syrup, with pancakes underneath. He gets the math wrong because he momentarily forgets that Earth’s rotations are divided into twenty-four hours instead of a more intuitive number such as twenty, and BoJack gives him an incredulous look and asks him  _ how  _ he passed seventh grade math, and Herb chuckles sort of nervously and then changes the subject.

“If I’m going to be in Disneyland, then I get to act like a kid, right?” He grins. “So, let’s stay up until midnight -- then it’s  _ technically  _ gonna be the fifteenth. And then we can, I dunno, sing the happy birthday song or something.”

BoJack raises an eyebrow at him. “That’s  _ stupid,  _ though.”

“Hey, let me be a kid.”

Saturday, BoJack decides, is their  _ Jack-of-all-trades  _ day. He lets himself get dragged through the park, and nods along and pretends he’s as enthusiastic as Herb is, but they never linger anywhere, always moving along before they have a chance to stay for more than five minutes. “Your actual  _ birthday  _ isn’t until tomorrow,” he insists. “If we do anything more than once, you’ll be sick of it and there'll be nothing to do tomorrow.”

“You’re just saying that because you’re sick of Mickey Mouse, aren’t you?”

“Of  _ course  _ I’m sick of Mickey Mouse. He’s just  _ weird.  _ Why doesn’t he wear a shirt?”

They stay up until the chime of midnight with a combination of willpower and absurd amounts of caffeine, and then pass out until close to ten in the morning. Sunday morning, they eat cake for breakfast, the overly sugary type with six different colours of icing and too many sprinkles. BoJack even decides to generously not eat  _ all  _ of it, like he usually does with other people’s birthday cakes, but instead settles for around half. He still has white, yellow, and pink icing stuck in the fur of his chin when Herb drags him onto a roller coaster that very predictably makes them both throw up.

“...Huh,” Herb mutters in realisation as he leans against a nearby pole for support. “Turns out, there’s a reason adults never liked this stuff when I was a kid.”

BoJack would agree with him if he was listening, but he isn’t, so he just nods along and waits for the floor to stop bobbing up and down. A few moments after it does, Herb proceeds to say, “But it’s weird, you know?”

“What is?”

“You know. Being an adult.” He has to pause for a moment before he can continue. “It’s, it’s like -- you know, all that stupid stuff adults tell you not to do? When you’re a kid? And then you grow up, and, and sometimes it’s like, yeah, that made sense, but -- but there’s other stuff, and it’s, why weren’t you allowed to do  _ that?  _ You know? Like, why is it disrespectful to wear hats inside?”

“I never figured that out either.”

“It’s so  _ dumb.  _ And, it’s weird, because, back in school, they used to always talk about how the stuff you learn is gonna be important as an adult. But  _ none  _ of it is! Except some of the English stuff, I guess, that’s good if you’re gonna be a writer. But  _ math?  _ When are you gonna need math in real life?”

“To get to Disneyland?” suggests BoJack. He frowns. “Why are you thinking about this, anyway? High school ended over a decade ago.”

“Yeah, but -- but I’m thinking about it, because it’s my birthday. And now I’m an adult twice over! So now it’s sort of making me think.”

BoJack tilts his head. “...Wasn’t the point of this whole trip to celebrate that you’re  _ good  _ at maths?”

He can practically  _ see  _ the gears turning in Herb’s head, and it’s a hell of a sight, too. First, the confusion, then the furrowed brows as he mentally checks his own math. His eyes widen as he realises his error, but he quickly laughs it off and nudges BoJack in the ribs. “That was a  _ mistake.  _ Okay?” He crosses his arms stubbornly. “If this was a test, then I would have gotten that one right, because I would have gone back and checked it. But, it’s  _ not  _ a test, so I made a mistake. Everyone thinks half of thirty-two is eighteen from time to time.”

“Mm-hmm,” says BoJack. “Seriously, dude,  _ how  _ did you pass seventh grade math?”

Herb rubs the back of his neck nervously, then clears his throat abnormally loudly. “Let’s … let’s go do some other stuff.”

* * *

The thing is, there’s no other stuff to  _ do.  _

There are other rides, of course, but the whole idea loses its appeal pretty quickly, even to BoJack, who’s never been to a theme park in his life because his parents were incapable of enjoying things and he spent most of his early adulthood convinced he didn’t deserve to have fun or do things. One can only vomit so many times in the span of a few hours before the entire exploit starts to feel like a chore, and that goes double for someone who’s being dragged from attraction to attraction by an overexcited man who  _ should  _ be too old for this bullshit.

Herb, evidently, finally gets sick of throwing up on roller coasters, and suggests that they stop for lunch.

“This is just …  _ real,”  _ he says, frowning, as he nudges his food with a fork. He  _ said  _ he was starving before they ordered, but now he’s just staring at it like he’s not entirely sure what to do with it. BoJack notices that, and he notices his own noticing of it, because normally he doesn’t notice things like his friends being upset. He’s almost  _ proud  _ of himself for catching it, when he normally fails to perceive Herb’s emotional state, but then gives up upon realising that being able to recognise when someone’s upset is useless unless he knows how to  _ help. _

“What do you mean?” he attempts.

“I dunno. I guess it’s just, this is my first time here, and I’d sort of hyped it up in my mind, you know? Made it seem magical, larger than life, that kind of thing. And, and it  _ is  _ nice, it’s just -- it’s  _ real,  _ you know? All the times I imagined it, I was never being realistic about it. You know?”

BoJack tilts his head, frowning. “I  _ don’t  _ know.”

“Oh, it’s hard to explain.” He waves a hand dismissively. “It’s just -- this isn’t all I told myself it would be. And, that’s not your fault, I just, well … I don’t know. I keep thinking that I could have just  _ failed  _ seventh grade math, and it wouldn’t have really been that big a deal.” He looks down at the table. There’s something in his voice that makes BoJack’s heart skip a beat.

He hesitates. “You know, if you’re not enjoying this, I can take you home. There’s other ways to celebrate a birthday.”

He shakes his head. “No, no, I  _ am  _ having fun. It’s just not the magical paradise my mom made it out to be when I was little. Or maybe it  _ is,  _ and I’m just twenty years late to the party and too old to have fun.” He chuckles nervously, and starts eating. BoJack lets himself relax a little at the realisation that he’s not really  _ upset,  _ just kind of  _ bummed out.  _ “No more roller coasters, though. I’m sick of puking.”

“Agreed,” says BoJack. “Do you want to go back to the hotel, after we’re done eating?”

“No way!” says Herb, visibly offended. “We’ve gotta buy some overpriced Disney merch. There’s no point coming here if I’m not gonna get a souvenir. Besides, we haven’t seen everything yet -- we should walk around for a little longer.”

BoJack pouts. “My legs hurt.”

“Maybe that means you don’t do enough walking.”

“Shut it, you.” He crosses his arms stubbornly. “I walk  _ heaps.  _ Like, I walk from my car to the set, and then after work I walk from my car to my front door, and sometimes I walk from my bedroom to my bathroom…”

“Mm-hmm,” says Herb. He laughs a little. “God, BJ, do you  _ ever  _ exercise?”

“No,” says BoJack defensively.  _ “Why  _ would I exercise? It’s too much effort.”

“...Because it’s  _ healthy?”  _ suggests Herb blankly.

“Oh, like you’re any better.”

“I  _ am.  _ I play basketball on weekends, because it’s  _ fun  _ and it helps me de-stress and not everything that takes effort is pointless, BJ.”

BoJack tilts his head. “... _ You  _ play basketball?”

“Yeah. Why are you so surprised?”

“I dunno, you just…” He gestures vaguely. “Don’t seem like the  _ type,  _ is all.”

Herb narrows his eyes. “Are you calling me short, or are you calling me fat?”

“...Whichever you’d be least offended by.” He clears his throat. “Being healthy is  _ dumb,  _ anyway. What’s the point? You’re gonna die anyway.”

Herb winces. “God, BJ, don’t say that.”

“It’s true, though.”

“That doesn’t mean you should say it! It’s my  _ birthday.  _ I don’t wanna spend my  _ birthday  _ thinking about my  _ deathday!” _

“You’re  _ old  _ now, Herb. You’d better get started on your will.”

Herb stiffens. “I’m only three years older than you.”

“It was the sixties, Herb, they were long years.” He finishes his food. “So, do you wanna go get some overpriced souvenirs?”

* * *

The thing is, Herb doesn’t want  _ any  _ of the overpriced souvenirs.

BoJack is still creeped out by the perpetual half-nakedness of Mickey Mouse when they start, but after an hour he’s desperately grabbing at anything with a hint of those comically large ears. “What about a T-shirt?” he suggests desperately.

Herb raises an eyebrow. “If Mickey doesn’t have to wear a shirt, then why do I?”

“What about a Cinderella doll?” he suggests, taking one from a shelf. 

“Since  _ when  _ do I give a shit about Cinderella?” He frowns. “Wait, since when do  _ you  _ give a shit about Cinderella?”

“I’m starting to give a shit against my will because all of these princess toys are  _ creeping me out.”  _ He shudders. “And my feet are  _ killing  _ me! Can you just pick a creepy doll or an overpriced shirt so we can go back to the hotel, and eat cake and get drunk?”

Herb raises an eyebrow. “We have work tomorrow.”

“And?”

“You really want to get drunk tonight so we can be hungover at work?”

“I was thinking we’d pull an all-nighter again while being drunk the whole time, so that tomorrow morning we’re both half-asleep and shitfaced at work but not hungover, but, eh, you do you.”

Herb groans. “I don’t want to just pick  _ any  _ random thing. I want something -- something that I  _ care  _ about, you know? Something that  _ matters.”  _ He fishes around in his jeans pocket for a moment before finding a lighter, then grabs a box of cigarettes from a breast pocket. “I mean, this is the first time I’ve ever been to a theme park. I want something to remember it by.”

_ “Why,  _ though? This isn’t  _ special.  _ I mean, it doesn’t have to be. You can come here whenever you want!”

“Yeah, well...” He lights the end of his cigarette and breathes in the resulting smoke. “...Yeah.”

BoJack frowns. “Hey, you good?”

“What?” Herb looks up sharply, stiffening. “...Oh, yeah. I’m fine.” 

“You sure? Your voice went a little weird for a second there.”

“I’m good. Trust me, I’m good.” He finishes the cigarette and drops the remains to the floor, where he puts it out with his shoe. Then he glances at his watch. “Look, if I haven’t found something cool in half an hour, I’ll just get the most generic Donald Duck thing I can find and be done with it, okay?” He smirks. “Can your  _ poor legs  _ handle that?”

“My legs aren’t  _ that  _ sore,” says BoJack defensively, even though they sort of are, rubbing the back of his neck nervously. Herb raises an eyebrow, and says something about how he’s  _ sure  _ that’s the case, and then turns a corner.

His eyes widen and he grins. Within seconds he’s eagerly tugging on BoJack’s arm, pointing and bouncing like he’s Sarah Lynn seeing her favourite pony toy, and BoJack is too shocked and too confused and too  _ tired  _ to accurately follow his gaze and figure out what he’s so excited about in the mess of colour. He doesn’t really catch on until he knows what he’s looking for, and he doesn’t know what he’s looking for until Herb finally regains his coherency for long enough to say, “I  _ told  _ you Michael Eisner didn’t care who I was sleeping with!”

BoJack is honestly quite impressed with himself for figuring out what he was meant to be looking for based on that one out-of-context line.

He steps forward and runs his fingers through a lock of artificial brown hair that doesn’t even come  _ close  _ to replicating Sabrina’s canonical hairstyle. Ethan stares at him sort of creepily with blank, unmoving eyes. He accidentally looks too hard at a large Olivia doll that brags in a sign below its shelf about how it  _ stands on its own,  _ and it topples over, causing him to have to spend a comically large amount of time trying to get it back the way it was. 

Herb grabs a large plush toy that  _ would  _ look just like BoJack, if the head wasn’t so disproportionately large and the neck was a little less weirdly thick and the eyes didn’t have a sparkle that the real actor hadn’t possessed in years. “I want this one.”

BoJack raises an eyebrow. “You want a giant plush of your best friend?”

“No, I want a giant plush of my favourite character from the sitcom I made.”

BoJack swears his heart skips a beat. He moves a hand to his chest in genuine pride and shock. “...The horse is your favourite character?”

“No, Ethan’s my favourite character. But the horse is a close second. And I’d feel weird having a toy of a twelve-year-old.”

“... _ Ethan  _ is your favourite character?” 

Herb nudges him in the ribs. “Hey, I picked, quit complaining. Let’s go pay for this so you can rest up. All tired out from walking, huh?”

“Not everyone has a goddamned walking fetish, Herb.” 

Herb laughs at that, and they start to walk off. After a moment of hesitation, BoJack goes back to grab a bobblehead figurine of his own character. It’s rare, after all, to find a toy that has as big a head as he does.

* * *

So, they head back to the hotel. Herb starts packing in preparation for the return trip, while BoJack continues throwing everything into a corner of the room and leaving it until the last possible minute. They eat dinner abnormally early to leave time for the ride home, followed by an absurd amount of more birthday cake for dessert, and then relax and watch the shitty princess movies that are unsurprisingly playing all the time here.

As  _ Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs  _ reaches its unsatisfying conclusion that really raises more questions than it answers, BoJack looks up. “So, when do you think we should start heading back?”

“Uh, I dunno,” answers Herb. He thinks for a moment. “Well, I mean, it’s like forty-five minutes driving, and we should probably be home by ten so I can get to bed at a reasonable time, so let’s be out of here by nine, okay?”

BoJack gives him a look.

He throws up his hands in frustration. “Oh, I  _ know  _ nine isn’t actually forty-five minutes before ten! I know I’m not exactly a math genius, but I know how long an hour is. I was rounding up because there might be traffic!”

“Sure, Herb. Whatever you say.” Still smirking, he casually tosses a giant plush version of himself across the room. “Seriously,  _ how  _ did you pass seventh grade math class?”

Herb chuckles nervously and takes the plush from where it landed on the floor. “Oh  _ man,  _ I should have come here before now.” He turns to face BoJack with a small, strained smile. “You know, when I was a kid, if you’d told me I’d pitch a show so good it gets bought by  _ Disney,  _ I’d never have believed it. And now I’ve done it, and…”

His face falls. He sinks down where he sits, his hands dropping carelessly to his sides, the overpriced plushie falling out of his fingers’ grip. He spends a long time just staring at a specific point in the floor, eyes wide, breathing shallow and rapid. “...BoJack, I don’t like  _ anything  _ about me.”

BoJack frowns. “Huh?” He stands up and takes a step toward Herb, and after a pause hesitantly places what he hopes is a comforting hand on his shoulder, but Herb stiffens at the contact in a way that makes him pull away on instinct, and when he tries it a second time a moment later, Herb outright  _ flinches.  _

BoJack, with the power of hindsight and a little wisdom, will later pin this moment down as a huge turning point in how he thinks of Herb. That tiny little movement, that  _ flinch  _ in response to someone trying to reassure him as he breaks down over  _ nothing,  _ makes BoJack realise something important. It causes him to let go of any resentment he once had, any irrational resentment over Herb’s inability to miraculously save him from the fact that he was constantly drowning, replaced by an understanding that even if it was, somehow, the sole responsibility of another person to  _ fix  _ BoJack, that person couldn’t be Herb. He loses all of that resentment in favour of the mutual, unspoken understanding that the reason Herb has thus far failed to by his lifeboat constantly is because they’re drowning together.

In short, it’s the moment when he realises Herb is just as  _ fucked up  _ as he is.

“None of this is  _ me,”  _ Herb continues, staring down at his own shaking hands. “These clothes aren’t me, this house isn’t me --”

“We’re not in your house right now.”

“I only brought this overpriced toy because I liked the reminder that I had a friend. And you’re not even a  _ good  _ friend! I just liked that someone still wanted to hang out with me…”

BoJack begins with an offended, “Hey,” but he quickly changes his tune when he realises Herb is still upset. “I, I mean, uh -- it’s okay! Everything’s okay.”

It’s like Herb can’t even hear his weak attempts at reassurance. He moves a trembling hand up to his face to wipe the tears away from his cheeks. “What am I supposed to  _ do?  _ I don’t know what to do.” He turns to BoJack. “Am I doomed? Are you doomed? Are we all  _ doomed?” _

BoJack spends longer than he’d like to admit just  _ staring  _ at Herb in stunned silence. He briefly considers saying that  _ yes,  _ they are all doomed, now let’s get some alcohol into him so he quits being all angsty and depressing, but he shakes off the idea, because as much as he’d like to play other people’s sadness off as a joke that needs fixing with excessive alcohol, he’d have no friends at all if he treated others with the same compassion or lack thereof that he has for himself. So, he tries to figure out what to  _ do. _

It’d probably be easier if he actually knew what was  _ wrong,  _ but right now, all he knows is that Herb is upset. So, he offers to help, in the only way he knows how.

“...Do you want to have sex?”

Herb gets emotional whiplash from the rapid change in conversation topic and physical whiplash from the rapid double take he does in response to it. He forces a small chuckle. “...Sorry?”

“You don’t have to. I just -- I thought, I don’t know, it might make you feel better --”

“Is  _ that  _ how you think you make people feel better?” He forces another chuckle. “I, uh. I didn’t realise you were into guys.”

“Yeah. I mostly date girls. 1993 isn’t exactly the best year to be openly bi.”

“Why are you specifying -- oh, never mind.” He gnaws on his lower lip, folding his knees up to his chest. “God, BJ, I owe you so much.”

“What? No, I owe  _ you.” _

“You helped make my dream sitcom into a reality, you stopped me from getting fired, you took me here, I…” He edges closer to BoJack. “I want to return the favour.” 

BoJack, frowning deeply, kneels down next to him. After a pause, he hesitantly slings an arm around his shoulders. This time, he doesn’t flinch. “Are you sure about this?”

“Mm … yes.” He turns his body toward BoJack, wrapping his arms around him. “I, I feel so  _ lonely,  _ BJ. Please, make it stop.”

BoJack tilts his head. “Why are  _ you  _ lonely? You have friends.”

“Mmmf, none of them  _ know  _ me, BJ. No-one can ever really _ know  _ me.”

“I’d like to …  _ know  _ you.” When Herb timidly shakes his head, he hesitates and then says, “Well, I can come close, then.” 


	9. Chapter 9

BoJack doesn’t see Herb after that. He collapses into his bed in a fit of post-coital exhaustion, forgetting entirely that he has a return trip to make, and wakes up early the next morning to discover that Herb’s possessions are gone, replaced by a note. A very  _ brief  _ note. It’s written in messy writing, not messy like  _ hands shaking  _ but messy like  _ in a rush,  _ and states that he tried to wake him up so they could leave, but he was fast asleep, so Herb just paid a fortune for the taxi home. The only thing making the note in any way significant is the almost comically large number of needless apologies gracing the paper.

“What’s he sorry _ for?”  _ he asks himself. But, he’s already late enough and he doesn't have _time_ to psychoanalyse Herb's hastily written goodbye note.

He skips breakfast and replaces it with coffee for the ride home, and he drives as fast as he safely and legally can, but he still only just manages to make it to work in time. He’s much later than he usually is, and worse still, he’s later than any of the kids, so Sharona can’t see to his hair until she’s already fixed up Sarah Lynn and Joelle.

So, he paces around outside the hair and makeup room irritably, and then, he sees him.

They spend a long time just  _ staring  _ at each other, in blunt shock. Which is stupid, because there is  _ no  _ excuse for them to be shocked because they both knew they’d see each other again because they’re  _ coworkers,  _ but it’s still a great surprise to both of them when they have to have this conversation  _ now,  _ of all times, and within hearing distance of the kids, too.

It’s Herb who finally breaks the silence. “So, um, about last night … ?” 

“It’s cool,” says BoJack, waving a hand dismissively. He drops his voice to a whisper so the kids won’t hear him. “I’ve banged  _ loads  _ of women I worked with, and with all of them, I just either ghosted or pretended nothing happened. So, let’s do that, okay?”

Herb visibly deflates. “...Oh.”

“What happened last night, it was -- it was  _ nothing,  _ okay? No strings attached.”

“There’s always  _ some  _ strings attached.”

BoJack raises an eyebrow. “I mean, I’m pretty sure you don’t need abortion money, but if you really want it, then --”

“I don’t want your  _ bribe.”  _ He crosses his arms, suddenly defensive. “This -- this isn’t  _ fair.  _ I mean, there’s always strings attached,  _ emotionally.  _ And, and if you don’t  _ care  _ about me, then you can just -- just do whatever you  _ want  _ with me, and then  _ leave,  _ and it won’t matter to you like it does to me. You could break me apart, and then abandon me to pick up the pieces.”

BoJack raises an eyebrow. “Uh,  _ yeah,  _ that’s kinda the whole idea of the no-strings-attached thing.” 

“It must be real easy to say that when you’re the one pulling the strings.” He pinches the bridge of his nose. “BJ, what happened last night, it was -- I’ve never done anything like that before. It was  _ so  _ not normal for me.”

“Really? Was for me.” He speaks casually, with that same callous tone in his voice, even as Herb’s voice starts to break. “Well, the part where you had a breakdown before was a little weird --”

“That was the  _ worst  _ part!” He folds his arms over his body defensively. “I  _ never  _ break down like that, and I  _ never  _ let my friends have an idea of how much I  _ hate  _ myself. Okay? Those are my  _ rules,  _ and I broke them for you, and I don’t know why. I was  _ so  _ vulnerable with you last night, and now I don’t know if you’re going to use that against me later on, and I feel  _ used.” _

“I don’t know what to tell you.” He rubs the back of his neck, a little nervously. “I’m not really a  _ committed relationship  _ kind of guy, okay? I’m more of a, let’s-bang-and-then-I’ll-ghost-you kinda guy. And I’m not even ghosting you! You should be grateful.”

“How would you ghost me? We’re coworkers.” He sighs. “What I meant, was -- I don’t  _ do  _ that. I never have sex with guys unless I’m already dating them.”

BoJack stiffens.

“And I suppose that makes you think you’re  _ better  _ than me, huh?”

Herb flinches. “What?”

“Look, I might be banging a new girl every week, but at least I’m honest with her, okay?” He points a finger accusingly at Herb. “At least  _ I  _ don’t act like it’s serious and then find an excuse for it to be her fault when we break up. And at least  _ I  _ don’t  _ dive  _ into the arms of a new boyfriend every goddamned week just so that I can feel like I’m  _ better  _ than everything because I date them for two seconds before I start sucking their dicks. Okay?!”

Herb stiffens for a moment, then glares. “What the  _ hell,  _ BJ?”

“I’m serious,” says BoJack, gesturing wildly. “You know what?  _ Nobody  _ knows I like guys, nobody except Charlotte, and only because I  _ told  _ her when I was drunk. You know why? Because I’m not as  _ desperate  _ as you!” He throws up his hands in frustration. “You should get off your goddamned high horse and try sleeping around a little. Maybe then you wouldn’t be dating every gay guy in L.A. because you need to have a lot of sex to distract you from the emptiness inside you, and you think that’s  _ bad  _ for some reason, but it’s miraculously okay if you  _ pretend  _ to care about them for a few weeks. But  _ sure,  _ Herb, the guy who had sex with you to cheer  _ you  _ up,  _ and  _ took you to goddamned Disneyland, is  _ using  _ you.”

Herb looks up at him with wide eyes and a quivering lip. If BoJack had perhaps a smidgen of extra self-awareness and compassion, maybe, he’d be choosing this moment to apologise. Instead, he just stands there feeling vaguely guilty.

“...You’re an  _ asshole,  _ BJ.” He looks down, turning his back on him. “And, I mean, that’s -- that’s nothing, really. That’s part of the deal. I knew what I was signing up for when I asked you to do this show with me.” He takes a deep breath. “But, I think maybe it’d be a little more bearable, if you weren’t so goddamned  _ proud  _ of it.”

* * *

So, BoJack goes ahead and does the  _ one  _ thing he promised himself he wouldn’t do. He ghosts Herb.

Well, he doesn’t exactly  _ ghost  _ him. He can’t, what with them being coworkers and all, but he can come close, and so he does come close. He conveniently loses his hearing whenever Herb talks about anything that isn’t directly related to the show, and focuses on his acting each day instead of on checking that Herb’s  _ okay,  _ and he lets himself become BoJack again instead of BJ. They drift apart. For around a week, things are just like they were before Herb got outed.

He doesn’t expect a phone call to change that. If he did, then he probably wouldn’t have been stupid enough, or smart enough, to answer it.

The phone call comes on a Sunday, exactly a week after Herb’s birthday. When BoJack answers it, his head is still a little sore as a remnant of his Friday night drinks with Sharona, which of course this week went on for so long that it would be more accurate to call it Saturday morning drinks with Sharona. Normally, he’d just ignore the phone, but the ringing is making his head hurt, and the most convenient available way to stop it is to answer it, so he does.

“You’re not being fair to Herb.”

“Ah. Nice to hear from you, too.” It’s been several months since Charlotte last called and you’d think she’d at least say hi before telling him off, but apparently everyone’s too busy with the  _ witch hunt against BoJack  _ to remember that they’re supposed to be his friends.

“Would you prefer if I pretended I  _ wasn’t  _ mad?”

Honestly, he kind of would, but he knows that’s the wrong thing to say, so he mumbles, “No, I’d prefer if you weren’t mad at me in the first place. I don’t  _ owe  _ it to Herb to date him.”

“Never said you did,” she replies casually. “But -- accusing him of just using all his ex-boyfriends for sex and then ignoring him all week? Come  _ on,  _ BoJack. I  _ know  _ you can be better than that.” 

BoJack uses the side of his head and neck to hold the phone so he can cross his arms stubbornly. “I don’t.”

“Yeah, we get it, you’re a huge dick. That’s not an excuse, okay? Thinking that you’re just  _ doomed  _ to be a jerk forever doesn’t justify hurting people. And, not wanting to date someone doesn’t justify being mean to them like that.”

He rolls his eyes. “How do you know about this, anyway?”

“Herb told me. He called to vent because he’s  _ upset,  _ because you  _ hurt  _ him.”

He groans. “Great. So you know we had sex.”

“Yeah. And I know you accused him of just  _ using  _ his exes for sex. That is  _ not  _ something you say when you’ve never even  _ met  _ any of his boyfriends.”

“Yeah, I know, I’m a stupid piece of shit.” He snickers. “I was right, though, wasn’t I?”

“...I don’t know.” She hesitates. “He, uh -- he talks to me about his boyfriends a lot. He’s had a lot of … not-great relationships. And, I mean, he never  _ says  _ that it’s his fault, but -- I’m sort of getting the sense that, you know. That he just dates any guy that will take him because he doesn’t want to be alone.”

“So I was right.”

“Kind of. Maybe. Look, BoJack, it’s -- Herb’s making himself vulnerable, by dating basically every gay guy he comes across. And, and I don’t really know what’s going on, but I get the sense that he’s just going out with  _ anyone  _ who’s willing to take him whether they’re compatible or not, and that makes it really easy for people to take advantage of him. It’s not fair of you to say he’s using people for that.”

“Ugh. Whatever.” He holds the phone again and starts pacing, as much as the stupid thing’s cord will allow him to. “Do you think I’ve got  _ time  _ to date Herb? Don’t be ridiculous. I’ve got my own shit going on. I’m trying to be the most beloved sitcom character in goddamned America, and of course I basically have to parent the child actors -- did you know Joelle Clarke’s doing trigonometry? And since  _ nobody  _ likes math I basically have to do all of their math homework for them. And I don’t know  _ how  _ to be a boyfriend! I can barely handle my own bullshit, and you want me to handle his as well? When he starts getting all angsty about how much he hates himself, I just have no  _ idea  _ what to --”

“Herb hates himself?”

He raises an eyebrow a little at her surprised tone. “Uh, yeah? How did he tell you about the breakdown without telling you that?”

“What breakdown?”

He blinks. “...So, like, did you just think we started having sex for no reason?”

“Um. Yes?” 

“Oh my God.” He smacks himself in the forehead in frustration. “I don’t even  _ know  _ what happened, Charlotte. We were just hanging out, and then out of nowhere he got all depressed and started freaking out. I was totally caught off guard, I didn’t know how to help. I was trying to think of ways to cheer him up and I suggested sex, and, well…” 

“...Oh my God. BoJack, you’re an  _ asshole.”  _

BoJack swears his heart skips a beat. “What do you mean?”

“He told you he hates himself, and you just  _ left  _ him? He  _ clearly  _ needs a friend right now.” She hesitates. “You know, he’s -- he’s  _ never  _ told me that before, and I’ve been his friend for a long time. I think you should be proud of yourself. You know, for letting him feel like he can open up to you. And even if you don’t want to date him --”

“Hey, I  _ never  _ said I don’t want to date him.” 

Charlotte is silent for a while, before bursting into a fit of giggles. “...Oh my God.”

“What?” he asks defensively.

“You’re in love with Herb.”

“No, I’m not!” He’s really not. He has  _ no  _ feelings for Herb. He  _ knows  _ that. As a matter of fact, he can already feel his cheeks warming up purely from how  _ little  _ he cares about Herb in a non-platonic sense. “Maybe  _ you’re  _ in love with Herb?”

“No, BoJack, that was years ago.  _ You’re  _ in love with Herb.”

“Oh,  _ come  _ on!” He throws up his hands in frustration. “I mean, am I attracted to him? Sure. Do my days feel better when I’m around him? Of course. Does he  _ get  _ me in ways nobody else ever has? Indubitably. Do I fantasize about him? Yeah, but only in two positions. Look, am I the kind of guy who would fall in love with my best friend like an idiot, then try to have a no-strings-attached sexual encounter with him, and then proceed to ghost him because I don’t know how to deal with my own emotions? Yes. But am I in  _ love  _ with him? The answer’s  _ no,  _ so quit trying to get me to ask him out.”

“...Which two positions?” 

He smirks.  _ “Now  _ who’s in love with Herb?”

“Both of us. Clearly. But I don’t have a chance and I know that. You might. And, whether you  _ like  _ him or not, he’s your friend and you hurt his feelings and you owe it to him to apologise.”

“...Yeah.” He sighs. “I’m, uh -- I’m gonna call him now.”

“You should. Good luck.”

“Thanks.” Hesitantly, he moves his thumb to the button to hang up the call, where it lingers for quite some time before he manages to press it. Then, he takes a deep breath, and types in Herb’s number.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> just so you guys know there's a good chance i wont get a chapter out tomorrow since i have work


	10. Chapter 10

It rings precisely two times. That’s a number that seems to indicate that he’s basically just  _ sitting around _ , that he’s not doing anything that he would have to pause before answering the phone, not even watching a TV show that would motivate him to wait a moment to see if it stops ringing on its own. Or, more likely, Herb isn’t stupid enough to assume that someone calling him for annoying reasons will hang up if he doesn’t answer within two rings. Come to think of it, BoJack is probably the only one who does that.

“Hey,” says Herb. “Who’s this?”

“It’s BoJack.” The silence that follows makes him a little uncomfortable, so he follows up with a completely unneeded, “Horseman. Obviously.”

“...Oh.” There’s a stiffness in his voice that wasn’t there when he first picked up the phone. “Hey, BJ.”

He clears his throat nervously. “Hey, I wanted to talk to you about … you know … I feel bad about -- what happened.”

There’s a pause. “So, you’re apologising?”

“Yes,” he confirms. “I’m sorry.”

“Okay.” There’s a long pause. “...Come over here and say it to my face, and maybe I’ll forgive you.” 

BoJack is caught off guard a little. “...Now?”

“Yeah,  _ now.  _ When else? Get the hell over here.”

“...Give me an hour.”

It would normally be considerably longer than that, what with getting dressed and all, but he doesn’t want to further ruin things with Herb, so he rushes through showering as fast as he can. It’s around a forty-five minute drive to Herb’s house, in Malibu, but he makes it quicker by sheer force of will. He’s only visited a handful of times before, for an intense brainstorming session for the show or when Herb dragged him into having dinner with him and the child actors, but he remembers the route like the back of his hand. He gets out of his car and knocks on the door. 

Herb answers a moment later. He rubs the back of his neck nervously. “...Hey.”

“Hey,” answers BoJack. “Can I come in?”

Herb wordlessly steps aside and gestures toward the couch. BoJack would feel weird sitting on it properly, so instead he perches himself on the armest. Herb closes the door behind him and sits down on the couch, away from him. 

“...I’m sorry,” says BoJack.

“No shit, Sherlock.” He turns away from him, arms folded. “What the  _ hell,  _ BJ?”

“I know, I messed up. I was an asshole. But --”

_ “Why  _ would you do that? Are you  _ trying  _ to play with my feelings, or are you just such a dick you don’t care who you hurt?” He turns to face him, frowning. “I let myself be vulnerable. I  _ trusted  _ you. You wouldn’t even say you didn’t explicitly plan on hurting me! That is, like, the  _ bare minimum  _ for being friends with someone.”

“I know, and I’m sorry. Just,  _ please,  _ let me explain.” Herb raises an eyebrow at him, just  _ daring  _ him to attempt an explanation. He takes a deep breath. “Herb, I’m  _ so  _ sorry about what happened on Monday. I didn’t mean any of that shit I said.”

“...Then why did you say it?”

“I don’t know! I -- I lashed out. I was scared, and I lashed out.”

Herb tilts his head to one side. “Scared of  _ what?” _

“Of -- of  _ us.”  _ He rubs the back of his neck nervously and avoids making eye contact. “I -- I  _ really  _ like you, Herb. A lot. But, I’m scared. Sometimes I feel like -- like I destroy everything I touch, you know? Every time I get into a relationship, it ends with both of us getting hurt. I don’t want that to happen with you.”

_ “Why?”  _ With that one word, he cuts through all of Bojack’s carefully prepared excuses and defenses. “That happens with your  _ friends,  _ too -- you end up hurting them, and yourself, because you’re an asshole. If that just  _ happens  _ with everyone you interact with, then I’m doomed anyway -- but it doesn’t just  _ happen,  _ BJ, it’s something you  _ do.  _ Cut that shit out.” 

BoJack rubs his arm anxiously. “I’m sorry.”

“No, you’re not. You’re  _ guilty.  _ And you should be! But -- but sometimes I don’t think that’s  _ enough,  _ you know?” He gestures vaguely. “Because, when you make a big show of how  _ you  _ feel so guilty for being a jackass, it sort of takes attention away from the people that are hurt  _ because  _ of you that might want some support for that. And, and it makes you look like a real  _ dick,  _ like you don’t even care that you hurt them because it’s all about  _ you!” _

“I know.” 

“And -- and does it  _ actually  _ end with both of you getting hurt every time you date someone, or do you just hurt them and feel bad about it? Because -- I don’t want to be  _ that,  _ BJ. I don’t want to be just another guy you screw over and then angst about forever.”

BoJack hesitates. “What  _ do  _ you want?”

“...I want  _ us.”  _ He leans in closer to BoJack. “I want to wake up and have you be the first thing I think about and the first person I see. I want to be broke all the time, because I keep seeing things that I think you’d like and buying them without a second thought. I want to trust you with -- with  _ everything  _ that I've never told anyone before, and I want people to come to me when they need you because they expect us to always be together. I want to watch the sunset with you, and I want to come running to you the second anything goes wrong, because you make me feel  _ safe.” _

BoJack’s eyes widen. “...Woah.”

“Is that what you want? I’m not doing it unless you want it as much as I do.” He looks up at BoJack with wide eyes.  _ “Please,  _ BJ. I don’t want to get hurt again.”

BoJack manages to smirk. “And you chose  _ me  _ to not hurt you?”

Herb chuckles nervously. “Yeah, I guess it’s kind of my fault if this goes downhill.”

“...No, it isn’t.” He slides off the armrest and sits properly on the couch, a little uncomfortably close to Herb. “I’m an asshole, okay? That’s my fault, not yours.  _ Nothing  _ that other people do to you is your fault.”

The next thing he knows, Herb is sobbing into his chest.

His first instinct is to back away, but there’s an inconveniently large couch immediately behind him that blocks any pathway, and before he can think of an alternate escape route his brain catches up with his instinct and he realises that backing away from someone who needs help is a dick move. So, he hesitantly wraps his arms around Herb, and he flinches a little at first but then he settles into it and he never  _ says  _ to stop so BoJack assumes it’s fine, and something about this feels  _ right,  _ in a way nothing he’s ever done before really has.

It feels like a long time before Herb’s breathing starts to even out. “...Oh my God.” He removes his head from BoJack’s chest, but stays close to him. ‘BJ, I think I  _ really  _ needed to hear that.” 

“No doy.” 

“Don’t joke about it! It’s --” He sniffles. “It  _ is  _ my fault.”

BoJack frowns. “What’s your fault?”

“Everything!” He grips the fabric of BoJack’s sweater tightly, forming balls of it in his fists,  _ desperate  _ for something to cling onto.  _ “Everything  _ is my fault!”

“...I’m sure that’s not true,” says BoJack carefully. “I mean, what do you think is your fault?”

Herb sniffles.  _ “Everything,”  _ he says again, his voice raw and scratchy and  _ desperate  _ for some evidence to the contrary, like he thinks BoJack is an  _ idiot  _ for not understanding what he means.

BoJack stares at him blankly. “...You know, you’re gonna have to narrow it down a little if you want me to help.”

“Never said I wanted you to help,” he replies stiffly. “Just -- give me  _ something,  _ BJ. The suspense here is killing me.”

BoJack hesitates, rubbing the back of his neck nervously. “I mean -- am I  _ good  _ for you?” He gestures vaguely. “I’ve already told you, I tend to hurt people. And I don’t even  _ know  _ what I did to upset you last week, or -- or  _ now!  _ I don’t --”

“Shh, shh, BJ. You never did anything wrong.” He wipes his eyes. “I  _ always  _ feel like that. You just … make me feel like it’s  _ okay  _ if I’m a human train wreck. You know?” He gestures vaguely. “I’m, I’m always hiding how I really feel,  _ always,  _ and that’s  _ fine,  _ but -- but sometimes when I’m with you, it’s like, maybe I can take a break from hiding now.”

BoJack forces a grin. “Yeah, because you know I’m such a mess that I’ve got no room to judge.”

“Not your fault,” says Herb, wrapping an arm around him. “It’s just because your parents messed you up.”

“...Yeah.” He frowns. “...Who messed  _ you  _ up?”

Herb freezes. “Huh?”

“Well, you -- you seem pretty miserable. And, I dunno, I’m kinda getting the sense that -- that something  _ happened.  _ So, who messed you up?”

“...I think I messed  _ myself  _ up.” 

BoJack’s frown deepens. “Huh?”

“I -- I’ve made a lot of bad decisions.  _ Really  _ bad decisions. It’s complicated. I don’t wanna talk about it.” He straightens up, arms folded over his body protectively. “Just -- just give me an answer, BJ, okay? I tried to ask you on Monday, if we  _ were  _ something. It’s been almost a week and I still haven’t gotten an answer.”

BoJack takes a deep breath. He hesitates. “You’re sure you want this?”

“Of course I am. Are you?”

“I’m never sure. So, let’s make it official, shall we?”

Herb clears his throat. “BoJack Horseman,” he begins, and he can’t manage to wipe the smile off his face. “Will you be my boyfriend?”

BoJack grins. “No doy.” He stands up. “You still look pretty upset. Wanna go out for a drink or several?”

Herb raises an eyebrow. “So we can be hungover for work tomorrow?”

“Eh, I’d rather have a physical headache than an emotional one.” Herb chuckles nervously in response to that. “So, are we going?”

Herb hesitates, then stands up. “I don’t want to go out looking like I’ve just been crying. There’s plenty of booze in the house.”

BoJack grins. “Ooh, I can already tell this is gonna go well.”


	11. Chapter 11

Their twenty-four hour anniversary, which Herb insists is a thing even though BoJack tries to point out that celebrating every little milestone is  _ clearly  _ jinxing it, is acknowledged by BoJack quite literally  _ dragging  _ him into the hair and makeup room on their lunch break, ignoring the teenage girl already in there.

“But  _ seriously,”  _ Joelle continues to rant. “They’re  _ underwater.  _ What do they  _ do?” _

Sharona just raises an irritated eyebrow at her and says, “Tampons?”

BoJack cringes like it’s them that are invading his conversation and not the other way around, and gestures to Herb. “Someone get some goddamn advil into this idiot. I got him hungover because I’m stupid.”

Sharona sighs as she begins to open her drawer. “Why didn’t you just stay home?”

“I don’t  _ need  _ to stay home,” Herb insists, a hand over his face to shield him from the light, while his other hand is leaning against a wall as he stumbles around.

“He’s a stubborn idiot,” explains BoJack.

There’s the slightest hint of a glare on Sharona’s face. “You know,” she murmurs, pressing a tablet into Herb’s hand. “You’re not the only one who gets hungover.”

“I’m the only one who has to listen to tap dancing for  _ three hours  _ when I am.” He dry swallows the pill. “Jesus  _ Christ, _ my head is  _ killing  _ me.”

Joelle frowns. “Why would you get drunk when you know you have work the next day?”

“Shut up,” snaps Herb. He takes a seat in the chair usually reserved for whoever’s having their hair and makeup done, then slams his head onto the desk. “Mmmf, somebody kill me now.”

Joelle clears her throat loudly, making Herb wince. “But, I mean, it’s basically a sponge, right? How does a  _ sponge  _ work underwater?”

“Joelle,” says Sharona irritably. “Maybe you should go help Bradley with his homework.”

She rolls her eyes. “Bradley’s doing seventh grade math! It’s  _ boring.” _

Herb lifts his head up from the table to glare at her. “I already have a headache.”

“He’s just asking me to help him find the perimeter of his hypothetical shapes. I  _ told  _ him to just add the sides together, but --”

“Just  _ go,”  _ BoJack almost snarls, because Herb is literally  _ retching  _ from the mere mention of basic math, and Joelle does so, if a little irritably. Herb slams his head back onto the table. BoJack chuckles nervously and drops his voice to a whisper. “He’s, uh -- he’s not really used to drinking. Like we are.” The words  _ because he’s not an alcoholic  _ linger in the air, unsaid but  _ so  _ heavily implied. The added  _ yet  _ is right behind them.

“Yeah,” deadpans Sharona in a low tone. “I gathered.” She frowns. “So why were you two getting drunk on a Sunday night anyway?”

BoJack feels his cheeks heating up. There must be  _ something  _ going on on his face despite his efforts to the contrary, because Sharona quickly starts to smirk. “Oh my God. You two.”

“Shut up,” snaps BoJack. 

“You’re  _ adorable.”  _

BoJack snaps at her to shut up even though a part of him is secretly  _ loving  _ this, the attention that comes from being in a relationship that people think has a chance of success. It makes him think that maybe he should take this seriously. 

* * *

Their one week anniversary, which is only  _ slightly  _ more valid than their one-day one and equally likely to be later blamed for jinxing them when --  _ if  _ this goes downhill, is a Sunday afternoon. That’s their one day away from the kids, apart from a call BoJack receives from Joelle at goddamned seven in the morning -- which is  _ basically  _ the crack of dawn -- asking if he knows whether  _ fish menstruate,  _ of all things. He replies that he doesn't, and that it’s  _ basically  _ the crack of dawn, and really she should ask a fish about this. He hangs up halfway through her explanation of how she doesn’t  _ know  _ any fish, and it’s incredibly inconvenient to post an online query asking for the input of any available fish in 1993.

Herb comes over to BoJack’s house to celebrate, long after he’s forgotten about the fish thing, and this time, they only have one beer between them, if the several drinks BoJack had beforehand don’t count. BoJack thinks about how normally if he has a girlfriend for this long, he sabotages the relationship for some reason, like an idiot. Except, apparently he doesn’t just  _ think  _ it, because hanging out with Herb makes him feel giddy, and feeling giddy makes him anxious because he has the nagging feeling that it’s only a matter of time before he screws up and loses that giddiness, and anxiety makes him drink, and drinking erodes away the filter that allows him to think before he says things. 

Herb raises an eyebrow at him. “Why would you  _ deliberately  _ sabotage your own relationships?”

“Eh, it’s -- it’s more of a subconscious thing,” he half-slurs tiredly. “Y’know? I never realise I’m doing it until after it’s already too late to get her back. I’m just, y’know, calling her slurs, thinking like, ‘wow, I’m being a stupid asshole right now. Why am I such a stupid asshole?’ And then, it’s like,  _ oh, that’s  _ why I’m such a stupid asshole.”

“Nice one,” snarks Herb, elbowing him in the ribs. “You should be a psychologist with that self-reflection.”

“Thank you,” says BoJack, in that tone that makes it unclear whether he’s missing the sarcasm or choosing to pretend he doesn’t because he loves praise so much. It’s hard to even tell himself after this many drinks.

Herb frowns. “Still, though. Why do you subconsciously sabotage all of your relationships?”

“Eh…” He cringes and gestures vaguely. “That’s kind of a whole thing.”

“Because of your daddy issues?”

“It’s more like my daddy had  _ me  _ issues.” He hesitates. “Um, can I touch you?”

Herb freezes. “What?”

“Well, it’s just, I noticed sometimes you sort of tense up when I touch you, so, I thought --”

“God. No.” He turns away from him, suddenly defensive. “I mean,  _ yes.  _ Yes to the touching. Jesus. Don’t ask again.”

BoJack frowns. “But --”

“If there’s a problem, I’ll tell you, okay?” He turns back to face him and manages a weak smile. “If I ever don’t want you to do something then I’ll tell you to stop. I don’t need a constant reminder that I keep flinching like a pussy.”

“...Yeah. Okay.” He sighs and leans into Herb, resting his head on his shoulder. “Herb, are you --  _ okay?” _

Whether he is or not, he can’t be  _ that  _ sobered from the question, because he manages to scoff and wave a hand dismissively and overall just laugh it off. “Am  _ I  _ okay? Jesus, BJ, you’re the one who was raised to think you were worthless.”

BoJack manages a nervous chuckle. “Yeah, that’s why I self-sabotage all my relationships, I guess. Something about how I’m afraid of getting  _ close  _ to people because at a certain point I have to talk about my past.”

“Well, maybe you could save us both a lot of pain by just telling me now, before you self-sabotage to avoid it.”

There’s this little nagging voice in BoJack’s head, saying  _ something is very wrong here.  _ A voice telling him that Herb is clearly  _ messed up,  _ and that there’s something very  _ wrong  _ behind the scenes of all this, and that it would be damn hypocritical of him to use him as a brick wall to vent to while not even  _ asking  _ about his own history. He’s  _ curious,  _ in the same way he’s curious about the ending to a scary movie, but he’s also  _ worried,  _ not worried like  _ is my favourite character going to die  _ but worried like  _ is he going to be okay?  _ It’s rare for BoJack to worry about another person like that, and rarer for him to act on it.

So, BoJack launches into a long rant about his own childhood, and pushes Herb’s out of his mind.

* * *

Their one  _ fortnight  _ anniversary is where BoJack would be drawing the line and saying this is  _ definitely  _ jinxing their relationship, if he didn’t secretly enjoy any excuse to hang out with Herb so much. He still maintains that this constant celebration that  _ we haven’t screwed this up yet  _ is going to be something they look back on with a grimace when --  _ if  _ they do screw it up. 

Herb, like an idiot, maintains that thinking like that is unhelpful and celebrating things is fine and  _ actually,  _ BoJack isn’t the only one who’s had a string of bad relationships that left him with intense anxiety and pessimism in relation to dating at all, and  _ maybe  _ he should quit making Herb more anxious as well. Perhaps, if BoJack was a more compassionate person, this would be the reason he neglects to say that they’re jinxing it on their one fortnight anniversary. Instead, the reason is that he doesn’t even think fortnights are a real thing.

“...Fortnight?” Herb continues to explain, gesturing vaguely and looking at BoJack like he’s an idiot. “As in, fourteen nights?”

“Nope,” BoJack insists. “Never heard of it.”

“Then what do you  _ say?  _ When you want to refer to a period that is two weeks long?”

“Uh,  _ two weeks?  _ Same number of syllables.” He raises an eyebrow. “Where do they say that, anyway?”

_ “Everywhere!”  _ He throws up his hands in frustration. “That’s what they say in Britain. That’s what they say in Australia.  _ Most  _ European languages have a specific word for two weeks instead of just saying  _ two weeks. _ Even if you’re  _ underwater,  _ people say fortnight, because it’s a useful word! Literally  _ everywhere  _ except America says it, and yet somehow Americans remain convinced that our way is  _ normal  _ and everyone else is just talking nonsense. It’s basically the time equivalent of Celsius.”

“...What’s Celsius?”

“Exactly! See, call Joelle. She’s super into being British now, she’ll know what they say.”

So, he calls Joelle. The first thing she says upon picking up the phone is, “So, it turns out fish  _ don’t  _ menstruate -- except, that just raises more questions, because some humans live underwater. And I don’t think tampons would --”

_ “Not  _ what I wanted to talk about. Not even remotely.” He smacks himself in the forehead. “Anyway, do you know what a fortnight is?”

“Yeah, it’s two weeks.”

“God dammit!” He hangs up before she can question this, then turns to Herb. “Okay, fine, you win. Fortnights are a thing.” 

“See? Told you so.” He wraps an arm around BoJack’s shoulders. “God, I’m so glad I picked you for the show.”

“Because now we’re dating?”

“No,” deadpans Herb. “because yesterday I saw a homophobe with a sign saying ‘it’s called  _ Horsin’ Around,  _ not  _ Horsin’ Around (in a gay way)’  _ and I’m glad I didn’t give them something they could use to make a  _ good  _ insult.” He elbows BoJack in the ribs.  _ “Yes,  _ because now we’re dating!”

BoJack smirks. “Who would you have picked for the show, anyway? Other than me?”

“I dunno.” He shrugs weakly. “Charlotte, maybe? If she was into it?”

“Oh God, I can see the signs now.” His voice rises an octave in mockery of this hypothetical homophobe. “It’s called  _ Deerin’ Around,  _ not  _ Queerin’ Around!” _

Herb shoots him an offended look. “You really think I would name a show  _ Deerin’ Around?” _

“Well, what  _ would  _ you call  _ Horsin’ Around  _ with a deer?”

“I dunno. I think it’s all about the character.” He grins. “Like, the horse, he’s always getting into schemes. He keeps  _ horsin’ around.  _ Charlotte, I don’t think she could play a character like that. She’d be more of an overbearing mom type, and the funny parts would be when she  _ just  _ realises what the kids have done  _ this  _ time, and she’d always get this terrified look on her face, like a --”

“Oh my God.” BoJack is visibly struggling not to laugh. “It’s called  _ Deer in the Headlights,  _ not  _ Queer in the Headlights!” _

“Now  _ that  _ would be a funny sign. Plus, I reckon there’s some gay kids out there that could really do with a reminder to look both ways before crossing the road.”

“Yeah.” He grins.  _ “Or,  _ I could just do everyone a favour and --”

_ “Nope.”  _ The interruption is strict and commanding, almost uncharacteristically so, but his face shows concern and so does the words he says a second later. “...Do you need to talk to someone?”

BoJack chuckles uneasily. “Yeah, that’d be nice.”

* * *

Their one-month anniversary is the one that causes the most contention. It’s actually a  _ thing --  _ as in, celebrating it is valid beyond a blatant commemoration of having not screwed up their relationship as early on as they usually do -- and BoJack can agree on that. What he  _ can’t  _ agree on is Herb’s ridiculous idea of what a month actually is.

“We should celebrate it on Sunday,” he insists. “Because a month is four weeks.”

“No, that’s an oversimplification. Months are longer than that.”

He tilts his head to one side. “So they’re five weeks? Next Sunday?”

“... _ How  _ do you think time works?” He smacks himself in the forehead. “A month is thirty or thirty-one days, or sometimes twenty-eight or twenty-nine in February, and the days within them have  _ numbers.  _ That’s how you know when your birthday is, right? It was on the fifteenth. And we got together a week after, so fifteen plus seven is …”

“...Twenty-one?”

“Nope. Try again.” He groans. “We got together on the twenty- _ second,  _ so one month after that is the twenty-second again, you dolt.”

“... _ Oh,”  _ says Herb after a long pause, his eyes widening in realisation.

On their  _ actual  _ one-month anniversary, they can’t do much beyond hanging out in the hair and makeup room on their lunch break and pretend they can’t hear Princess Carolyn desperately trying to get Herb’s attention.

“So here’s what I’m thinking,” Herb rants in a low, conspiratorial tone. “I’m gonna hire someone to stand next to me to make me look tall --”

“Good luck finding someone short enough,” snarks BoJack.

Someone short enough is standing in the doorway, as a matter of fact. Nobody notices, partially because she’s wearing heels and partially because her incessant nagging has already faded into white noise. “Herb!” she hisses. Everyone ignores her.

Joelle walks into the room, Sarah Lynn by her side. “I’m telling you,” she insists. “Sharks don’t  _ actually  _ start going crazy and eating people when they smell blood.”

Sarah Lynn shrugs. “I’m sure they have  _ some  _ way of dealing with it.”

“I’m telling you, they just have to free-bleed.”

“No way, there are  _ sharks!”  _

Sharona pinches the bridge of her nose. “Please tell me you’re not talking about the same stupid thing you’ve been going on about for the past  _ month.” _

“I’m trying to figure it out,” says Joelle defensively. She turns to Herb. “Hey, Herb, you have a computer, right? Can I borrow it to research something?”

“Depends,” says Herb, narrowing his eyes. “Is it for school?”

“No, it’s just something I thought of in the shower one day, and now I can’t  _ un- _ think it. There are people that live in those underwater cities with fish, right? So how do those people deal with their periods?”

Herb’s eyes widen. “Surprisingly, I  _ don’t  _ need to give you my computer for that, because I already know.”

“... _ Why  _ do you know that?”

_ “Herb!”  _ hisses Princess Carolyn.

Herb turns on his heel, irritated. “What?”

“There’s a call for you. Apparently it’s important.”

“Ugh, are you serious?” He groans. “Who is it, anyway?

“Some guy named Goldie.” 

Herb immediately pales. “... _ Him?”  _

“Yeah, him. Do you know him?”

“He’s just … family.” He storms out of the room to take the call, but there’s a  _ moment  _ there, BoJack’s sure of it. A moment when Herb damn near  _ freezes  _ in shock at the mere  _ mention  _ of this peron’s name. A moment when Herb looks like, well, a queer in the headlights. BoJack almost runs after him, but something stops him at the last minute.

Sharona tilts her head. “Why  _ does  _ he know that?”

“Eh, why does anyone know anything?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> yknow one day id like to think of a name for herbs dad that isnt obviously "generic animal name" but whatevs


	12. Chapter 12

Joelle’s eyes are wide as she stands in the doorway, watching as he paces as much as the phone cord in 1993 will allow. She’s straining her ears for any fragment of the conversation, not out of concern or morbid curiosity like Sharona and BoJack, but purely from impatience, trying to get a hint of a “goodbye” or “well, it was nice talking to you” or anything else that implies that the conversation is going to end so he can answer her question.

Finally, he hangs up, and storms back into the hair and makeup room. Joelle opens her mouth to continue pestering him, and he almost immediately shoos her and Sarah Lynn out of the room. Once they’re gone, he shuts the door behind them, and his gaze lingers for a moment on Sharona’s orange juice before he shakes his head. “Okay, um…” He clears his throat. “Well, I was just on the phone with my dad, talking about taxes. And now, I’m going to go talk about taxes some more, before eventually proceeding to file my taxes.”

Sharona blinks. “...What?”

“I’m talking about taxes so the kids will get bored and stop listening in.”

BoJack breathes a sigh of relief. “Oh, phew, I thought you just got super boring. Was that your dad?”

“Yeah. The  _ stupidest  _ thing.” He groans loudly. “So, my mom disowned me, right? Except, it turns out my idiot dad actually objected to that, and he just didn’t say anything like a goddamned coward. And  _ now,  _ my mom’s gonna be out of town for a day soon, and he wants me and my sister to come over for some stupid reason.”

Sharona frowns, tilting her head a little to one side. “Your sister?”

“The  _ other  _ shame of the family. She’s queer too. Weirdly, it’s  _ her  _ that’s somehow  _ bringing shame to the household,  _ and not my other sister that  _ still  _ hasn’t moved out.”

“How old’s your other sister?” asks BoJack.

“She’s goddamned thirty! She's older than you, BJ. And, she  _ has  _ a job, but she’s still just mooching off my parents eternally. Ugh!” He smacks himself in the forehead. “What an  _ asshole.  _ Who ghosts me like that when I needed him, and then turns around and expects me to come over like it’s no biggie?”

“What did you say?” asks Sharona. 

“I said I’d come, because if I said no then he might get my idiot mom to stay and stop me from coming later if I change my mind. And after the shit he pulled, it serves him right if I change my mind last minute and he’s left not knowing where the heck I am.” He crosses his arms stubbornly. “I’m so pissed off at him.”

“Don’t go,” says BoJack automatically. Herb raises an eyebrow at him and he elaborates. “I mean, you wouldn’t ask me to go hang out with  _ my  _ asshole dad, would you?”

“Mine’s not as bad as yours. Besides, it’ll be nice to get a chance to see Coral again.” At their blank stares, he adds, “Coral’s my older sister. I was in freshman year when she got kicked out and I was never allowed to talk to her, so we kinda lost contact. I’ve been meaning to get her phone number but I don’t even know where she lives. And…”

He trails off sheepishly. Sharona narrows her eyes. “And what?”

“And, I  _ kinda  _ told him I’d bring my boyfriend.”

BoJack groans. “Seriously?”

“I know, I know, dick move.”

“Why didn’t you ask me first?!”

“There was no time! If I hung up to talk to you then by the time we were done my mom could be back from the store and then my dad couldn’t talk. I made an executive decision.”

“You’re not an executive.”

“Fine! Then I made a  _ my asshole dad wants me to come over I don’t know if Coral’s dating anyone and I’ll look stupid if I’m the only single person there  _ decision. If you don’t want to come, I can always just flake on him.”

“I  _ do  _ want to come. I just prefer if people ask me, okay?” 

Herb’s eyes light up. “So you can come underwater for a few hours?”

BoJack’s eyes widen. “...Sorry,  _ underwater?” _

“Yeah,” answers Herb nonchalantly. “I grew up in a small town underwater, sort of near Malibu. Why?”

“... _ How?”  _ chokes Sharona. 

“Pretty easily? Jeez, don’t make this a whole thing.”

“But you’re a mammal. Didn’t you drown?”

“Clearly I didn't.” They continue to gape at him. He sighs. “I had to wear a special helmet that was connected to an oxygen tank so I could breathe.”

“And when the tank ran out?” 

“Then I changed it. There was a huge artificial air pocket in my house and we weren’t  _ that  _ deep, anyway. I could usually swim to the surface before I ran out of air.”

“And if you  _ didn’t  _ get to air in time?”

“Then I would have drowned. But that didn’t happen, because I’m not an idiot.” While she continues to gape at him, he adds, “It sounds scary as shit but it’s pretty normal if you grew up with it. It just became part of the routine, you know? Like, you’ve gotta eat food so you don’t die, and you’ve gotta change your oxygen tank every couple hours so you don’t die, and you gotta drink water --”

_ “How  _ did you drink water?!”

BoJack shudders. “I don’t know, Herb. I mean, I haven’t been underwater since my mom tried to drown me when I was twenty-two.”

Herb opens his mouth, then closes it, then opens it again. “Sorry, you -- you haven’t been underwater since your mom  _ what?!” _

“Tried to drown me, yeah. She was like that.”

“I  _ knew  _ you when you were twenty-two! Why didn’t I know about this at the time?! Oh my God, was it that time you went to visit and came back all freaked out?”

“Yeah, that was it. We had a fight, she got super pissed, tried to drown me, blah blah blah. Eventually my dad came and broke us up because he didn’t want the stupid bitch to end up in jail. Woah!” His eyes widen as Herb wraps his arms around him tightly. “It’s okay, I’m okay! It was a long time ago. I’m okay. I can come with you to visit your asshole dad.”

Herb hesitantly takes a step back from BoJack. “You’re  _ sure  _ you’re okay?”

“It was seven years ago. I’m fine now, really.”

“Okay, but -- but you don’t  _ have  _ to come, okay?” He hesitates, beginning to pace in a circle around the room. “I mean, maybe I  _ should  _ flake on him. I don’t know if Cupcake -- my other sister -- is really  _ okay  _ with me being gay. All my old friends probably know by now and it’s gonna be  _ super  _ toxic if everyone’s homophobic. Plus, I haven’t been underwater for more than a few hours since I was nineteen -- my sign’s a little rusty.” He makes some strange hand gestures to demonstrate. BoJack and Sharona stare at him blankly. “I couldn’t speak the fish language because we have totally different mouth and throat structures and only a handful of people understood English, so I learned a sort of underwater sign language to communicate.”

“Does everyone there know the sign language?” asks Sharona.

“Mostly, yeah. If someone didn’t then it was never hard to find an interpreter. But there’s gonna be other chances to catch up with Coral! Hopefully, anyway. If all my friends from high school hate me now for being an ugly fag then I’d prefer not to know about it. And…” His voice drops to a whisper. “I don’t really want to see my dad.”

BoJack punches the air in triumph. “I  _ knew  _ you had daddy issues!”

Sharona’s eyes widen. “...Your boyfriend is upset because his asshole dad gave him a shitty childhood, and your first reaction is to be  _ happy  _ that you were right about him having daddy issues?”

“We don’t need you to narrate our conversations, Sharona.”

Herb waves a hand dismissively and forces a laugh. “How can I have  _ daddy issues,  _ when I barely had a dad in the first place to have issues with?”

Sharona cringes. “That sounds like you’ve got some serious daddy issues.”

“Yeah, well…” He sighs. “My dad was pretty …  _ absent  _ during my childhood, I guess. Not physically, but --  _ emotionally,  _ you know? I mean, sometimes it was nice, because my mom could be a little strict, but -- but he wasn’t  _ laid-back,  _ he just didn’t really give a shit what we were doing all the time. He barely ever even interacted with us. All he cared about was watching his stupid TV all the time -- he could barely remember how old I was.”

“That sounds awful.”

“Eh, could have been worse.” He waves a hand dismissively. “He was  _ there,  _ and he never hurt me, and I knew my mom loved me anyway. I don’t think it really affected me. Although, I  _ do  _ tend to write escapist stories about single dads actually  _ being  _ dads, and I  _ do  _ use the words ‘mom’ and ‘parents’ interchangeably, but that’s about it. It’s just shitty that he thinks he has the right to waltz back into my life  _ now  _ when he barely even knows me in the first place. But, it’s fine.” He sighs. “It’s fine. We’ll go to the stupid thing.”

“You’re sure?” asks BoJack.

“Yeah, I’m sure.”

“When is it?”

“Next Saturday. I’ll pick you up and everything, just be prepared to wear a really dumb looking helmet.” He sighs. “I’d better go. Joelle has some very awkward questions for me.” He swiftly exits the room. 

Sharona frowns. “Why  _ does  _ he know that?”

“Dude, he  _ just  _ explained how he grew up underwater.” He sighs. “Do you ever … get the sense that there’s something  _ up,  _ with him?”

“You’re gonna have to be more specific.”

“Like, I think something …  _ happened.  _ To Herb. When he was a kid, I mean.”

Sharona raises an eyebrow. “You mean, you think he has trauma?” At his small, meek nod, she adds, “I don’t really see it.

“He’s good at hiding it. Better than I am, anyway. But you don’t know him like I do. You haven’t seen him when he freaks out.”

“Huh. I guess that makes sense.” 

“But he never wants to talk about it. If I even  _ begin  _ to ask he starts getting defensive. And, I mean, I  _ want  _ to know -- and I don’t just mean that like I’m curious and sick of being in expense, I want to know how to  _ help  _ him, but -- but I don’t want to push him to talk either, you know?”

“Hmm.” She hesitates. “You know what I think?”

“What?”

“This is your chance.” He raises an eyebrow and she elaborates. “You think he has childhood trauma, right? If you want to find out what happened, you’ve gotta ask someone who was there for his childhood.”

“He said he wasn’t close to his dad, though.”

“Yeah, but his sisters are gonna be there too. They’ve gotta have  _ something  _ between them.”

“...Maybe.” He grabs some of her orange juice and tears the straw out, then uses it to puncture the top. “Maybe.”

**Author's Note:**

> hey guys i know seeing notes like these probably works in reverse like the endless "please subscribe" rants at the end of youtube videos but please leave a comment/kudos if you enjoyed this fic! feedback keeps me going


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